He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny
Assingham didn’t now matter—the “now” he had even himself supplied, as
no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages; and, though
his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behaviour, for the hour,
so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he
had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the
Foreign Office. With regret, none the less, would he have seen it quite
extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind
instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a
convenience. It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward,
since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension; but he
had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her,
have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the
pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of
where he was had begun to show itself as rather more closed than open
to interpretation. It had never indeed, before that evening, come up as
during the passage at the official party, and he had for the first
time at those moments, a little disappointedly, got the impression of a
certain failure, on the dear woman’s part, of something he was aware of
having always rather freely taken for granted in her. Of what exactly
the failure consisted he would still perhaps have felt it a little harsh
to try to say; and if she had in fact, as by Charlotte’s observation,
“broken down,” the details of the collapse would be comparatively
unimportant. They came to the same thing, all such collapses—the
failure of courage, the failure of friendship, or the failure just
simply of tact; for didn’t any one of them by itself amount really to
the failure of wit?—which was the last thing he had expected of her
and which would be but another name for the triumph of stupidity. It had
been Charlotte’s remark that they were at last “beyond” her; whereas he
had ever enjoyed believing that a certain easy imagination in her would
keep up with him to the end. He shrank from affixing a label to Mrs.
Assingham’s want of faith; but when he thought, at his ease, of the
way persons who were capable really entertained—or at least with any
refinement—the passion of personal loyalty, he figured for them a play
of fancy neither timorous nor scrupulous. So would his personal loyalty,
if need be, have accepted the adventure for the good creature herself;
to that definite degree that he had positively almost missed the luxury
of some such call from her. That was what it all came back to again with
these people among whom he was married—that one found one used one’s
imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal
to it. He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them
that was worthy—to call worthy—of the personal relation; never any
charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed. He might
vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them;
he might humourously have put it that one had never, as by the higher
conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare, insidiously,
the cup. These were the services that, by all romantic tradition, were
consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate. But he could amuse
himself with saying—so far as the amusement went—that they were what
he had once for all turned his back on.
Fanny was meanwhile frequent, it appeared, in Eaton Square; so much
he gathered from the visitor who was not infrequent, least of all at
tea-time, during the same period, in Portland Place; though they had
little need to talk of her after practically agreeing that they had
outlived her. To the scene of these conversations and suppressions Mrs.
Assingham herself made, actually, no approach; her latest view of her
utility seeming to be that it had found in Eaton Square its most urgent
field. It was finding there in fact everything and everyone but the
Prince, who mostly, just now, kept away, or who, at all events, on the
interspaced occasions of his calling, happened not to encounter the
only person from whom he was a little estranged. It would have been
all prodigious if he had not already, with Charlotte’s aid, so very
considerably lived into it—it would have been all indescribably
remarkable, this fact that, with wonderful causes for it so operating on
the surface, nobody else, as yet, in the combination, seemed estranged
from anybody. If Mrs. Assingham delighted in Maggie she knew by
this time how most easily to reach her, and if she was unhappy about
Charlotte she knew, by the same reasoning, how most probably to miss
that vision of her on which affliction would feed. It might feed of
course on finding her so absent from her home—just as this particular
phenomenon of her domestic detachment could be, by the anxious mind,
best studied there. Fanny was, however, for her reasons, “shy” of
Portland Place itself—this was appreciable; so that she might well,
after all, have no great light on the question of whether Charlotte’s
appearances there were frequent or not, any more than on that of the
account they might be keeping of the usual solitude (since it came
to this) of the head of that house. There was always, to cover all
ambiguities, to constitute a fund of explanation for the divisions of
Mrs. Verver’s day, the circumstance that, at the point they had all
reached together, Mrs. Verver was definitely and by general acclamation
in charge of the “social relations” of the family, literally of those of
the two households; as to her genius for representing which in the
great world and in the grand style vivid evidence had more and more
accumulated. It had been established in the two households at an early
stage, and with the highest good-humour, that Charlotte was a, was THE,
“social success,” whereas the Princess, though kind, though punctilious,
though charming, though in fact the dearest little creature in the world
and the Princess into the bargain, was distinctly not, would distinctly
never be, and might as well, practically, give it up: whether through
being above it or below it, too much outside of it or too much lost in
it, too unequipped or too indisposed, didn’t especially matter. What
sufficed was that the whole thing, call it appetite or call it
patience, the act of representation at large and the daily business of
intercourse, fell in with Charlotte’s tested facility and, not much less
visibly, with her accommodating, her generous, view of her domestic use.
She had come, frankly, into the connection, to do and to be what she
could, “no questions asked,” and she had taken over, accordingly, as it
stood, and in the finest practical spirit, the burden of a visiting-list
that Maggie, originally, left to herself, and left even more to the
Principino, had suffered to get inordinately out of hand.
She had in a word not only mounted, cheerfully, the London
treadmill—she had handsomely professed herself, for the further comfort
of the three others, sustained in the effort by a “frivolous side,” if
that were not too harsh a name for a pleasant constitutional curiosity.
There were possibilities of dulness, ponderosities of practice, arid
social sands, the bad quarters-of-an-hour that turned up like false
pieces in a debased currency, of which she made, on principle, very
nearly as light as if she had not been clever enough to distinguish. The
Prince had, on this score, paid her his compliment soon after her
return from her wedding-tour in America, where, by all accounts, she
had wondrously borne the brunt; facing brightly, at her husband’s side,
everything that came up—and what had come, often, was beyond words:
just as, precisely, with her own interest only at stake, she had thrown
up the game during the visit paid before her marriage. The discussion of
the American world, the comparison of notes, impressions and adventures,
had been all at hand, as a ground of meeting for Mrs. Verver and her
husband’s son-in-law, from the hour of the reunion of the two couples.
Thus it had been, in short, that Charlotte could, for her friend’s
appreciation, so promptly make her point; even using expressions from
which he let her see, at the hour, that he drew amusement of his own.
“What could be more simple than one’s going through with everything,”
she had asked, “when it’s so plain a part of one’s contract? I’ve got so
much, by my marriage”—for she had never for a moment concealed from him
how “much” she had felt it and was finding it “that I should deserve
no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the
contrary all one can, are just one’s decency and one’s honour and one’s
virtue. These things, henceforth, if you’re interested to know, are my
rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images
set up on the wall. Oh yes, since I’m not a brute,” she had wound
up, “you shall see me as I AM!” Which was therefore as he had seen
her—dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and from one
occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office.
Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless, all the while,
contributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which her husband and her
husband’s daughter were lapped. It had in fact probably done something
more than this—it had given them a finer and sweeter view of the
possible scope of that ease. They had brought her in—on the crudest
expression of it—to do the “worldly” for them, and she had done it with
such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even
more than they had originally intended. In proportion as she did it,
moreover, was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings; which
minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore upon Maggie,
in whose chords and whose province they more naturally lay. Not less
naturally, by the same token, they included the repair, at the hands of
the latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte
in Eaton Square. This was homely work, but that was just what made it
Maggie’s. Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great
mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn’t, no doubt,
quite equally provide for—that would be, to balance, just in a manner
Charlotte’s very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could
be got adequately to recognise it.
Well, that Charlotte might be appraised as at last not ineffectually
recognising it, was a reflection that, during the days with which we are
actually engaged, completed in the Prince’s breast these others, these
images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings and fittings of
his conscience and his experience, that we have attempted to set in
order there. They bore him company, not insufficiently—considering, in
especial, his fuller resources in that line—while he worked out—to the
last lucidity the principle on which he forbore either to seek Fanny out
in Cadogan Place or to perpetrate the error of too marked an assiduity
in Eaton Square. This error would be his not availing himself to the
utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or
of Charlotte’s, that might prevail there. That artless theories could
and did prevail was a fact he had ended by accepting, under copious
evidence, as definite and ultimate; and it consorted with common
prudence, with the simplest economy of life, not to be wasteful of any
odd gleaning. To haunt Eaton Square, in fine, would be to show that
he had not, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the
world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having
it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it
to each other, everything possible. What further propped up the case,
moreover, was that the “world,” by still another beautiful perversity of
their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like
the same extent Eaton Square. The latter residence, at the same time, it
must promptly be added, did, on occasion, wake up to opportunity and,
as giving itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations—one
of which fitful flights, precisely, had, before Easter, the effect of
disturbing a little our young man’s measure of his margin. Maggie, with
a proper spirit, held that her father ought from time to time to give a
really considered dinner, and Mr. Verver, who had as little idea as ever
of not meeting expectation, was of the harmonious opinion that his wife
ought. Charlotte’s own judgment was, always, that they were ideally
free—the proof of which would always be, she maintained, that everyone
they feared they might most have alienated by neglect would arrive,
wreathed with smiles, on the merest hint of a belated signal. Wreathed
in smiles, all round, truly enough, these apologetic banquets struck
Amerigo as being; they were, frankly, touching occasions to him, marked,
in the great London bousculade, with a small, still grace of their own,
an investing amenity and humanity. Everybody came, everybody rushed;
but all succumbed to the soft influence, and the brutality of mere
multitude, of curiosity without tenderness, was put off, at the foot
of the fine staircase, with the overcoats and shawls. The entertainment
offered a few evenings before Easter, and at which Maggie and he
were inevitably present as guests, was a discharge of obligations not
insistently incurred, and had thereby, possibly, all the more, the note
of this almost Arcadian optimism: a large, bright, dull, murmurous,
mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland,
though very exalted, immensely announceable and hierarchically placeable
couples, and followed, without the oppression of a later contingent, by
a brief instrumental concert, over the preparation of which, the Prince
knew, Maggie’s anxiety had conferred with Charlotte’s ingenuity and both
had supremely revelled, as it were, in Mr. Verver’s solvency.
The Assinghams were there, by prescription, though quite at the foot of
the social ladder, and with the Colonel’s wife, in spite of her humility
of position, the Prince was more inwardly occupied than with any other
person except Charlotte. He was occupied with Charlotte because, in the
first place, she looked so inordinately handsome and held so high, where
so much else was mature and sedate, the torch of responsive youth and
the standard of passive grace; and because of the fact that, in the
second, the occasion, so far as it referred itself with any confidence
of emphasis to a hostess, seemed to refer itself preferentially,
well-meaningly and perversely, to Maggie. It was not indistinguishable
to him, when once they were all stationed, that his wife too had in
perfection her own little character; but he wondered how it managed so
visibly to simplify itself—and this, he knew, in spite of any desire
she entertained—to the essential air of having overmuch on her mind the
felicity, and indeed the very conduct and credit, of the feast. He knew,
as well, the other things of which her appearance was at any time—and
in Eaton Square especially—made up: her resemblance to her father, at
times so vivid, and coming out, in the delicate warmth of occasions,
like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her resemblance, as he had
hit it off for her once in Rome, in the first flushed days, after their
engagement, to a little dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement
but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench;
her approximation, finally—for it was analogy, somehow, more than
identity—to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative
propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of wifehood and
motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and
last, the honour of that line, Maggie would no doubt, at fifty, have
expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest
a little but a Cornelia in miniature. A light, however, broke for him in
season, and when once it had done so it made him more than ever aware
of Mrs. Verver’s vaguely, yet quite exquisitely, contingent
participation—a mere hinted or tendered discretion; in short of Mrs.
Verver’s indescribable, unfathomable relation to the scene. Her placed
condition, her natural seat and neighbourhood, her intenser presence,
her quieter smile, her fewer jewels, were inevitably all as nothing
compared with the preoccupation that burned in Maggie like a small flame
and that had in fact kindled in each of her cheeks a little attesting,
but fortunately by no means unbecoming, spot. The party was her father’s
party, and its greater or smaller success was a question having for her
all the importance of his importance; so that sympathy created for her
a sort of visible suspense, under pressure of which she bristled with
filial reference, with little filial recalls of expression, movement,
tone. It was all unmistakable, and as pretty as possible, if one would,
and even as funny; but it put the pair so together, as undivided by the
marriage of each, that the Princess il n’y avait pas a dire—might sit
where she liked: she would still, always, in that house, be irremediably
Maggie Verver. The Prince found himself on this occasion so beset with
that perception that its natural complement for him would really have
been to wonder if Mr. Verver had produced on people something of the
same impression in the recorded cases of his having dined with his
daughter.
This backward speculation, had it begun to play, however, would have
been easily arrested; for it was at present to come over Amerigo as
never before that his remarkable father-in-law was the man in the world
least equipped with different appearances for different hours. He was
simple, he was a revelation of simplicity, and that was the end of him
so far as he consisted of an appearance at all—a question that might
verily, for a weakness in it, have been argued. It amused our young man,
who was taking his pleasure to-night, it will be seen, in sundry occult
ways, it amused him to feel how everything else the master of the
house consisted of, resources, possessions, facilities and amiabilities
amplified by the social legend, depended, for conveying the effect of
quantity, on no personal “equation,” no mere measurable medium. Quantity
was in the air for these good people, and Mr. Verver’s estimable quality
was almost wholly in that pervasion. He was meagre and modest and
clearbrowed, and his eyes, if they wandered without fear, yet stayed
without defiance; his shoulders were not broad, his chest was not high,
his complexion was not fresh, and the crown of his head was not covered;
in spite of all of which he looked, at the top of his table, so nearly
like a little boy shyly entertaining in virtue of some imposed rank,
that he COULD only be one of the powers, the representative of a
force—quite as an infant king is the representative of a dynasty. In
this generalised view of his father-in-law, intensified to-night but
always operative, Amerigo had now for some time taken refuge. The
refuge, after the reunion of the two households in England, had more and
more offered itself as the substitute for communities, from man to man,
that, by his original calculation, might have become possible, but
that had not really ripened and flowered. He met the decent family eyes
across the table, met them afterwards in the music-room, but only to
read in them still what he had learned to read during his first months,
the time of over-anxious initiation, a kind of apprehension in which
the terms and conditions were finally fixed and absolute. This directed
regard rested at its ease, but it neither lingered nor penetrated,
and was, to the Prince’s fancy, much of the same order as any glance
directed, for due attention, from the same quarter, to the figure of a
cheque received in the course of business and about to be enclosed to a
banker. It made sure of the amount—and just so, from time to time,
the amount of the Prince was made sure. He was being thus, in renewed
instalments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank as a
value, but subject, in this comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite
endorsement. The net result of all of which, moreover, was that the
young man had no wish to see his value diminish. He himself, after all,
had not fixed it—the “figure” was a conception all of Mr. Verver’s own.
Certainly, however, everything must be kept up to it; never so much as
to-night had the Prince felt this. He would have been uncomfortable, as
these quiet expressions passed, had the case not been guaranteed for him
by the intensity of his accord with Charlotte. It was impossible that he
should not now and again meet Charlotte’s eyes, as it was also visible
that she too now and again met her husband’s. For her as well, in all
his pulses, he felt the conveyed impression. It put them, it kept them
together, through the vain show of their separation, made the two other
faces, made the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the lights, the
flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, a mystic golden bridge
between them, strongly swaying and sometimes almost vertiginous, for
that intimacy of which the sovereign law would be the vigilance of
“care,” would be never rashly to forget and never consciously to wound.