XXI

He found himself therefore saying, with gaiety, even to Fanny Assingham,

for their common, concerned glance at Eaton Square, the glance that was

so markedly never, as it might have been, a glance at Portland Place:

“What WOULD our cari sposi have made of it here? what would they, you

know, really?”—which overflow would have been reckless if, already, and

surprisingly perhaps even to himself, he had not got used to thinking of

this friend as a person in whom the element of protest had of late been

unmistakably allayed. He exposed himself of course to her replying:

“Ah, if it would have been so bad for them, how can it be so good for

you?”—but, quite apart from the small sense the question would have had

at the best, she appeared already to unite with him in confidence and

cheer. He had his view, as well—or at least a partial one—of the inner

spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent

with the retraction he had practically seen her make after Mr. Verver’s

last dinner. Without diplomatising to do so, with no effort to square

her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no

use in her if it were not sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and

moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her

just discernible depression. By just so much as he guessed that she felt

herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the

expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made

up to her, from hour to hour, for the penalties, as they might have been

grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all,

in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for

being—as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first

half-hour, at tea, to proclaim herself—the sole and single frump of

the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor

values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and

her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons

amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham’s—these matters and

others would be all, now, as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give

her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always, at the worst,

be picturesque—for she habitually spoke of herself as “local” to Sloane

Street whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible. And

it all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement, in her,

of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn’t really

watching him—ground for which would have been too terribly grave—she

had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure: SO she might, precisely,

mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take—the

Prince could see it all: it wasn’t a shade of interference that a

good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn’t even say, when she

told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously

going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed

eyes and lips, that she now knew her—he didn’t then say “Ah, see what

you’ve done: isn’t it rather your own fault?” He behaved differently

altogether: eminently distinguished himself—for she told him she had

never seen him so universally distinguished—he yet distinguished her

in her obscurity, or in what was worse, her objective absurdity, and

frankly invested her with her absolute value, surrounded her with all

the importance of her wit. That wit, as discriminated from stature and

complexion, a sense for “bridge” and a credit for pearls, could have

importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived at Matcham; so that his

“niceness” to her—she called it only niceness, but it brought tears

into her eyes—had the greatness of a general as well as of a special

demonstration.

“She understands,” he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs.

Verver—“she understands all she needs to understand. She has taken her

time, but she has at last made it out for herself: she sees how all we

can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with

the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most

favourable to it. She can’t of course very well put it to us that

we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our

circumstances; she can’t say in so many words ‘Don’t think of me, for

I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as

you must.’ I don’t get quite THAT from her, any more than I ask for it.

But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean

that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as

tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers. So that

she’s—well,” the Prince wound up, “what you may call practically all

right.” Charlotte in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn’t

call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or

whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it

aloud. She let him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself;

only on the eve of their visit’s end was she, for once, clear or direct

in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the

house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of chances they

had already, a couple of times, arrived at by waiting persistently

till the last other loiterers had gone to dress, and by being prepared

themselves to dress so expeditiously that they might, a little later on,

be among the first to appear in festal array. The hall then was

empty, before the army of rearranging, cushion-patting housemaids were

marshalled in, and there was a place by the forsaken fire, at one end,

where they might imitate, with art, the unpremeditated. Above all, here,

for the snatched instants, they could breathe so near to each other that

the interval was almost engulfed in it, and the intensity both of the

union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact. They

had prolongations of instants that counted as visions of bliss; they had

slow approximations that counted as long caresses. The quality of these

passages, in truth, made the spoken word, and especially the spoken word

about other people, fall below them; so that our young woman’s tone had

even now a certain dryness. “It’s very good of her, my dear, to trust

us. But what else can she do?”

“Why, whatever people do when they don’t trust. Let one see they don’t.”

“But let whom see?”

“Well, let ME, say, to begin with.”

“And should you mind that?”

He had a slight show of surprise. “Shouldn’t you?”

“Her letting you see? No,” said Charlotte; “the only thing I can imagine

myself minding is what you yourself, if you don’t look out, may let HER

see.” To which she added: “You may let her see, you know, that you’re

afraid.”

“I’m only afraid of you, a little, at moments,” he presently returned.

“But I shan’t let Fanny see that.”

It was clear, however, that neither the limits nor the extent of

Mrs. Assingham’s vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave

expression to this as she had not even yet done. “What in the world

can she do against us? There’s not a word that she can breathe. She’s

helpless; she can’t speak; she would be herself the first to be dished

by it.” And then as he seemed slow to follow: “It all comes back to her.

It all began with her. Everything, from the first. She introduced you to

Maggie. She made your marriage.”

The Prince might have had his moment of demur, but at this, after a

little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on. “Mayn’t she also

be said, a good deal, to have made yours? That was intended, I think,

wasn’t it? for a kind of rectification.”

Charlotte, on her side, for an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter

still. “I don’t mean there was anything to rectify; everything was as it

had to be, and I’m not speaking of how she may have been concerned for

you and me. I’m speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, THEIR

lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up to-day. She can’t go

to them and say ‘It’s very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but

I was frivolously mistaken.’”

He took it in still, with his long look at her. “All the more that she

wasn’t. She was right. Everything’s right,” he went on, “and everything

will stay so.”

“Then that’s all I say.”

But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous

lucidity. “We’re happy, and they’re happy. What more does the position

admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?”

“Ah, my dear,” said Charlotte, “it’s not I who say that she need want

anything. I only say that she’s FIXED, that she must stand exactly where

everything has, by her own act, placed her. It’s you who have seemed

haunted with the possibility, for her, of some injurious alternative,

something or other we must be prepared for.” And she had, with her high

reasoning, a strange cold smile. “We ARE prepared—for anything, for

everything; and AS we are, practically, so she must take us. She’s

condemned to consistency; she’s doomed, poor thing, to a genial

optimism. That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her

nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then, therefore,” Mrs.

Verver gently laughed, “she has the chance of her life!”

“So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be

sincere?—may be but a mask for doubts and fears, and for gaining time?”

The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this, again, could

trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience.

“You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I

feel, at any rate, that I’ve nothing to do with her doubts and fears, or

with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It’s

enough for me that she’ll always be, of necessity, much more afraid for

herself, REALLY, either to see or to speak, than we should be to

have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren’t.” And

Charlotte’s face, with these words—to the mitigation of the slightly

hard ring there might otherwise have been in them—fairly lightened,

softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity

of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually

pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption—so apt is the

countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a

sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed, the next instant, have

seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already

on her lips; for it was still unmistakable with him that there were

things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at

all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been

even completely present to his companion, what other term could she

have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that

exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved

her, at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which

they hadn’t heretofore by a hair’s breadth deviated. “If it didn’t sound

so vulgar I should say that we’re—fatally, as it were—SAFE. Pardon the

low expression—since it’s what we happen to be. We’re so because they

are. And they’re so because they can’t be anything else, from the moment

that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn’t now be able to

bear herself if she didn’t keep them so. That’s the way she’s inevitably

WITH us,” said Charlotte over her smile. “We hang, essentially,

together.”

Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every

way it worked out. “Yes, I see. We hang, essentially, together.”

His friend had a shrug—a shrug that had a grace. “Cosa volete?” The

effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. “Ah, beyond doubt, it’s

a case.”

He stood looking at her. “It’s a case. There can’t,” he said, “have been

many.”

“Perhaps never, never, never any other. That,” she smiled, “I confess I

should like to think. Only ours.”

“Only ours—most probably. Speriamo.” To which, as after hushed

connections, he presently added: “Poor Fanny!” But Charlotte had

already, with a start and a warning hand, turned from a glance at

the clock. She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the

staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round

at him, she vanished. Something in the sight, however, appeared to have

renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon

the air. “Poor, poor Fanny!”

It was to prove, however, on the morrow, quite consistent with the

spirit of these words that, the party at Matcham breaking up and

multitudinously dispersing, he should be able to meet the question of

the social side of the process of repatriation with due presence of

mind. It was impossible, for reasons, that he should travel to town with

the Assinghams; it was impossible, for the same reasons, that he

should travel to town save in the conditions that he had for the

last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might have been said

profoundly, thinking out. The result of his thought was already precious

to him, and this put at his service, he sufficiently believed, the right

tone for disposing of his elder friend’s suggestion, an assumption in

fact equally full and mild, that he and Charlotte would conveniently

take the same train and occupy the same compartment as the Colonel and

herself. The extension of the idea to Mrs. Verver had been, precisely,

a part of Mrs. Assingham’s mildness, and nothing could better have

characterised her sense for social shades than her easy perception that

the gentleman from Portland Place and the lady from Eaton Square might

now confess, quite without indiscretion, to simultaneity of movement.

She had made, for the four days, no direct appeal to the latter

personage, but the Prince was accidental witness of her taking a fresh

start at the moment the company were about to scatter for the last night

of their stay. There had been, at this climax, the usual preparatory

talk about hours and combinations, in the midst of which poor

Fanny gently approached Mrs. Verver. She said “You and the Prince,

love,”—quite, apparently, without blinking; she took for granted their

public withdrawal together; she remarked that she and Bob were alike

ready, in the interest of sociability, to take any train that would

make them all one party. “I feel really as if, all this time, I had seen

nothing of you”—that gave an added grace to the candour of the dear

thing’s approach. But just then it was, on the other hand, that the

young man found himself borrow most effectively the secret of the right

tone for doing as he preferred. His preference had, during the evening,

not failed of occasion to press him with mute insistences; practically

without words, without any sort of straight telegraphy, it had arrived

at a felt identity with Charlotte’s own. She spoke all for their friend

while she answered their friend’s question, but she none the less

signalled to him as definitely as if she had fluttered a white

handkerchief from a window. “It’s awfully sweet of you, darling—our

going together would be charming. But you mustn’t mind us—you must

suit yourselves we’ve settled, Amerigo and I, to stay over till after

luncheon.”

Amerigo, with the chink of this gold in his ear, turned straight away,

so as not to be instantly appealed to; and for the very emotion of the

wonder, furthermore, of what divination may achieve when winged by a

community of passion. Charlotte had uttered the exact plea that he had

been keeping ready for the same foreseen necessity, and had uttered

it simply as a consequence of their deepening unexpressed need of each

other and without the passing between them of a word. He hadn’t, God

knew, to take it from her—he was too conscious of what he wanted; but

the lesson for him was in the straight clear tone that Charlotte could

thus distil, in the perfect felicity of her adding no explanation, no

touch for plausibility, that she wasn’t strictly obliged to add, and

in the truly superior way in which women, so situated, express

and distinguish themselves. She had answered Mrs. Assingham quite

adequately; she had not spoiled it by a reason a scrap larger than the

smallest that would serve, and she had, above all, thrown off, for his

stretched but covered attention, an image that flashed like a mirror

played at the face of the sun. The measure of EVERYTHING, to all his

sense, at these moments, was in it—the measure especially of the

thought that had been growing with him a positive obsession and that

began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having, by perfect

parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole consciousness had by

this time begun almost to ache with a truth of an exquisite order,

at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming

herself—the truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days

couldn’t possibly, save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some

still other and still greater beauty. It had already told them, with

an hourly voice, that it had a meaning—a meaning that their associated

sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the plough through the

sands and the sight, afar, of the palm-cluster, might drink in at last

the promised well in the desert. There had been beauty, day after day,

and there had been, for the spiritual lips, something of the pervasive

taste of it; yet it was all, none the less, as if their response had

remained below their fortune. How to bring it, by some brave, free

lift, up to the same height was the idea with which, behind and beneath

everything, he was restlessly occupied, and in the exploration of which,

as in that of the sun-chequered greenwood of romance, his spirit thus,

at the opening of a vista, met hers. They were already, from that

moment, so hand-in-hand in the place that he found himself making use,

five minutes later, of exactly the same tone as Charlotte’s for telling

Mrs. Assingham that he was likewise, in the matter of the return to

London, sorry for what mightn’t be.

This had become, of a sudden, the simplest thing in the world—the

sense of which moreover seemed really to amount to a portent that he

should feel, forevermore, on the general head, conveniently at his ease

with her. He went in fact a step further than Charlotte—put the latter

forward as creating his necessity. She was staying over luncheon to

oblige their hostess—as a consequence of which he must also stay to see

her decently home. He must deliver her safe and sound, he felt, in Eaton

Square. Regret as he might, too, the difference made by this obligation,

he frankly didn’t mind, inasmuch as, over and above the pleasure itself,

his scruple would certainly gratify both Mr. Verver and Maggie.

They never yet had absolutely and entirely learned, he even found

deliberation to intimate, how little he really neglected the first—as

it seemed nowadays quite to have become—of his domestic duties:

therefore he still constantly felt how little he must remit his effort

to make them remark it. To which he added with equal lucidity that

they would return in time for dinner, and if he didn’t, as a last word,

subjoin that it would be “lovely” of Fanny to find, on her own return,

a moment to go to Eaton Square and report them as struggling bravely on,

this was not because the impulse, down to the very name for the amiable

act, altogether failed to rise. His inward assurance, his general plan,

had at moments, where she was concerned, its drops of continuity, and

nothing would less have pleased him than that she should suspect in

him, however tempted, any element of conscious “cheek.” But he was

always—that was really the upshot—cultivating thanklessly the

considerate and the delicate: it was a long lesson, this unlearning,

with people of English race, all the little superstitions that accompany

friendship. Mrs. Assingham herself was the first to say that she would

unfailingly “report”; she brought it out in fact, he thought, quite

wonderfully—having attained the summit of the wonderful during the

brief interval that had separated her appeal to Charlotte from this

passage with himself. She had taken the five minutes, obviously, amid

the rest of the talk and the movement, to retire into her tent for

meditation—which showed, among several things, the impression Charlotte

had made on her. It was from the tent she emerged, as with arms

refurbished; though who indeed could say if the manner in which she now

met him spoke most, really, of the glitter of battle or of the white

waver of the flag of truce? The parley was short either way; the

gallantry of her offer was all sufficient.

“I’ll go to our friends then—I’ll ask for luncheon. I’ll tell them when

to expect you.”

“That will be charming. Say we’re all right.”

“All right—precisely. I can’t say more,” Mrs. Assingham smiled.

“No doubt.” But he considered, as for the possible importance of it.

“Neither can you, by what I seem to feel, say less.”

“Oh, I WON’T say less!” Fanny laughed; with which, the next moment, she

had turned away. But they had it again, not less bravely, on the

morrow, after breakfast, in the thick of the advancing carriages and the

exchange of farewells. “I think I’ll send home my maid from Euston,” she

was then prepared to amend, “and go to Eaton Square straight. So you can

be easy.”

“Oh, I think we’re easy,” the Prince returned. “Be sure to say, at any

rate, that we’re bearing up.”

“You’re bearing up—good. And Charlotte returns to dinner?”

“To dinner. We’re not likely, I think, to make another night away.”

“Well then, I wish you at least a pleasant day,”

“Oh,” he laughed as they separated, “we shall do our best for

it!”—after which, in due course, with the announcement of their

conveyance, the Assinghams rolled off.