Fanny, on her arrival in town, carried out her second idea, despatching
the Colonel to his club for luncheon and packing her maid into a cab,
for Cadogan Place, with the variety of their effects. The result of this
for each of the pair was a state of occupation so unbroken that the day
practically passed without fresh contact between them. They dined out
together, but it was both in going to their dinner and in coming back
that they appeared, on either side, to have least to communicate.
Fanny was wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the
lemon-coloured mantle that protected her bare shoulders, and her
husband, with her silence to deal with, showed himself not less disposed
than usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would have said, his
end of it. They had, in general, in these days, longer pauses and more
abrupt transitions; in one of which latter they found themselves, for a
climax, launched at midnight. Mrs. Assingham, rather wearily housed
again, ascended to the first floor, there to sink, overburdened, on the
landing outside the drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian chair—of
which at first, however, she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of
throne of meditation. She would thus have recalled a little, with her so
free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at
last to become articulate. The Colonel, not unlike, on his side, some
old pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of that monument, went, by
way of reconnoissance, into the drawing-room. He visited, according to
his wont, the windows and their fastenings; he cast round the place the
eye, all at once, of the master and the manager, the commandant and the
rate-payer; then he came back to his wife, before whom, for a moment, he
stood waiting. But she herself, for a time, continued to wait, only
looking up at him inscrutably. There was in these minor manoeuvres and
conscious patiences something of a suspension of their old custom of
divergent discussion, that intercourse by misunderstanding which had
grown so clumsy now. This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show
it could yield, on occasion, to any clear trouble; though it was also
sensibly, and just incoherently, in the air that no trouble was at
present to be vulgarly recognised as clear.
There might, for that matter, even have been in Mr. Assingham’s face a
mild perception of some finer sense—a sense for his wife’s situation,
and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate—that
she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe
upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did. She knew he
needed no telling that she had given herself, all the afternoon, to her
friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but
the prompt result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming
baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a process
surrounded by him, while it so unmistakably went on, with abstentions
and discretions that might almost have counted as solemnities. The
solemnities, at the same time, had committed him to nothing—to nothing
beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep waters. She had
been out on these waters, for him, visibly; and his tribute to the fact
had been his keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight. He had
not quitted for an hour, during her adventure, the shore of the mystic
lake; he had on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal
to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her bark had
parted—THEN some sort of plunge would have become his immediate duty.
His present position, clearly, was that of seeing her in the centre of
her sheet of dark water, and of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him
didn’t perhaps mean that her planks WERE now parting. He held himself
so ready that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled off coat and
waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however—that is before he had uttered
a question—he perceived, not without relief, that she was making for
land. He watched her steadily paddle, always a little nearer, and at
last he felt her boat bump. The bump was distinct, and in fact she
stepped ashore. “We were all wrong. There’s nothing.”
“Nothing—?” It was like giving her his hand up the bank.
“Between Charlotte Verver and the Prince. I was uneasy—but I’m
satisfied now. I was in fact quite mistaken. There’s nothing.”
“But I thought,” said Bob Assingham, “that that was just what you did
persistently asseverate. You’ve guaranteed their straightness from the
first.”
“No—I’ve never till now guaranteed anything but my own disposition to
worry. I’ve never till now,” Fanny went on gravely from her chair, “had
such a chance to see and to judge. I had it at that place—if I had, in
my infatuation and my folly,” she added with expression, “nothing
else. So I did see—I HAVE seen. And now I know.” Her emphasis, as she
repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility, rise
higher. “I know.”
The Colonel took it—but took it at first in silence. “Do you mean
they’ve TOLD you—?”
“No—I mean nothing so absurd. For in the first place I haven’t asked
them, and in the second their word in such a matter wouldn’t count.”
“Oh,” said the Colonel with all his oddity, “they’d tell US.”
It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his short
cuts, always across her finest flower-beds; but she felt, none the less,
that she kept her irony down. “Then when they’ve told you, you’ll be
perhaps so good as to let me know.”
He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the back
of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye. “Ah, I don’t say that
they’d necessarily tell me that they ARE over the traces.”
“They’ll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I hope, and
I’m talking of them now as I take them for myself only. THAT’S enough
for me—it’s all I have to regard.” With which, after an instant,
“They’re wonderful,” said Fanny Assingham.
“Indeed,” her husband concurred, “I really think they are.”
“You’d think it still more if you knew. But you don’t know—because
you don’t see. Their situation”—this was what he didn’t see—“is too
extraordinary.”
“‘Too’?” He was willing to try.
“Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn’t see. But just
that, in a way, is what saves them. They take it seriously.”
He followed at his own pace. “Their situation?”
“The incredible side of it. They make it credible.”
“Credible then—you do say—to YOU?”
She looked at him again for an interval. “They believe in it themselves.
They take it for what it is. And that,” she said, “saves them.”
“But if what it ‘is’ is just their chance—?”
“It’s their chance for what I told you when Charlotte first turned up.
It’s their chance for the idea that I was then sure she had.”
The Colonel showed his effort to recall. “Oh, your idea, at different
moments, of any one of THEIR ideas!” This dim procession, visibly,
mustered before him, and, with the best will in the world, he could but
watch its immensity. “Are you speaking now of something to which you can
comfortably settle down?”
Again, for a little, she only glowered at him. “I’ve come back to my
belief, and that I have done so—”
“Well?” he asked as she paused.
“Well, shows that I’m right—for I assure you I had wandered far. Now
I’m at home again, and I mean,” said Fanny Assingham, “to stay here.
They’re beautiful,” she declared.
“The Prince and Charlotte?”
“The Prince and Charlotte. THAT’S how they’re so remarkable. And the
beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re afraid for them. Afraid, I
mean, for the others.”
“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following. “Afraid of
what?”
“Afraid of themselves.”
The Colonel wondered. “Of THEMSELVES? Of Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s
selves?”
Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. “Yes—of SUCH
blindness too. But most of all of their own danger.”
He turned it over. “That danger BEING the blindness—?”
“That danger being their position. What their position contains—of
all the elements—I needn’t at this time of day attempt to tell you. It
contains, luckily—for that’s the mercy—everything BUT blindness:
I mean on their part. The blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her
husband’s.”
He stood for a moment; he WOULD have it straight. “Whose husband’s?”
“Mr. Verver’s,” she went on. “The blindness is most of all his. That
they feel—that they see. But it’s also his wife’s.”
“Whose wife’s?” he asked as she continued to gloom at him in a manner at
variance with the comparative cheer of her contention. And then as she
only gloomed: “The Prince’s?”
“Maggie’s own—Maggie’s very own,” she pursued as for herself.
He had a pause. “Do you think Maggie so blind?”
“The question isn’t of what I think. The question’s of the conviction
that guides the Prince and Charlotte—who have better opportunities than
I for judging.”
The Colonel again wondered. “Are you so very sure their opportunities
are better?”
“Well,” his wife asked, “what is their whole so extraordinary situation,
their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?”
“Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity—of their extraordinary
situation and relation—as much as they.”
“With the difference, darling,” she returned with some spirit, “that
neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see the boat
they’re in, but I’m not, thank God, in it myself. To-day, however,” Mrs.
Assingham added, “to-day in Eaton Square I did see.”
“Well then, what?”
But she mused over it still. “Oh, many things. More, somehow, than ever
before. It was as if, God help me, I was seeing FOR them—I mean for the
others. It was as if something had happened—I don’t know what, except
some effect of these days with them at that place—that had either made
things come out or had cleared my own eyes.” These eyes indeed of the
poor lady’s rested on her companion’s, meanwhile, with the lustre not
so much of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at
various other times had occasion to recognise. She desired, obviously,
to reassure him, but it apparently took a couple of large, candid,
gathering, glittering tears to emphasise the fact. They had immediately,
for him, their usual direct action: she must reassure him, he was made
to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it
as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it
took such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable
for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out in the
afternoon. “It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them—”
“What makes them?”—he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.
“Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It might
well have been difficult to know HOW to take it; and they may even
say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see. As I say,
to-day,” she went on, “it was as if I were suddenly, with a kind of
horrible push, seeing through their eyes.” On which, as to shake off her
perversity, Fanny Assingham sprang up. But she remained there, under the
dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare
look of “type,” to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of
inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat gave a
rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might, at the late hour and
in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly adventurers,
driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning
in an odd corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of
ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing,
as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and
compunction. “I can imagine the way it works,” she said; “it’s so easy
to understand. Yet I don’t want to be wrong,” she the next moment broke
out “I don’t, I don’t want to be wrong!”
“To make a mistake, you mean?”
Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she
meant. “I don’t make mistakes. But I perpetrate—in thought—crimes.”
And she spoke with all intensity. “I’m a most dreadful person. There are
times when I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, or what I think or
imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I’d do it again—feel that
I’d do things myself.”
“Ah, my dear!” the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.
“Yes, if you had driven me back on my ‘nature.’ Luckily for you you
never have. You’ve done every thing else, but you’ve never done that.
But what I really don’t a bit want,” she declared, “is to abet them or
to protect them.”
Her companion turned this over. “What is there to protect them
from?—if, by your now so settled faith, they’ve done nothing that
justly exposes them.”
And it in fact half pulled her up. “Well, from a sudden scare. From the
alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think.”
“Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing—?”
She waited again. “It isn’t my ‘whole’ idea. Nothing is my ‘whole’
idea—for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there’s so much in the
air.”
“Oh, in the air—!” the Colonel dryly breathed.
“Well, what’s in the air always HAS—hasn’t it?—to come down to the
earth. And Maggie,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “is a very curious little
person. Since I was ‘in,’ this afternoon, for seeing more than I had
ever done—well, I felt THAT too, for some reason, as I hadn’t yet felt
it.”
“For ‘some’ reason? For what reason?” And then, as his wife at first
said nothing: “Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different?”
“She’s always so different from anyone else in the world that it’s hard
to say when she’s different from herself. But she has made me,” said
Fanny after an instant, “think of her differently. She drove me home.”
“Home here?”
“First to Portland Place—on her leaving her father: since she does,
once in a while, leave him. That was to keep me with her a little
longer. But she kept the carriage and, after tea there, came with me
herself back here. This was also for the same purpose. Then she went
home, though I had brought her a message from the Prince that arranged
their movements otherwise. He and Charlotte must have arrived—if they
have arrived—expecting to drive together to Eaton Square and keep
Maggie on to dinner there. She has everything there, you know—she has
clothes.”
The Colonel didn’t in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension. “Oh,
you mean a change?”
“Twenty changes, if you like—all sorts of things. She dresses, really,
Maggie does, as much for her father—and she always did—as for her
husband or for herself. She has her room in his house very much as she
had it before she was married—and just as the boy has quite a second
nursery there, in which Mrs. Noble, when she comes with him, makes
herself, I assure you, at home. Si bien that if Charlotte, in her own
house, so to speak, should wish a friend or two to stay with her, she
really would be scarce able to put them up.”
It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself, Bob
Assingham could more or less enter. “Maggie and the child spread so?”
“Maggie and the child spread so.”
Well, he considered. “It IS rather rum,”
“That’s all I claim”—she seemed thankful for the word. “I don’t say
it’s anything more—but it IS, distinctly, rum.”
Which, after an instant, the Colonel took up. “‘More’? What more COULD
it be?”
“It could be that she’s unhappy, and that she takes her funny little
way of consoling herself. For if she were unhappy”—Mrs. Assingham had
figured it out—“that’s just the way, I’m convinced, she would take. But
how can she be unhappy, since—as I’m also convinced—she, in the midst
of everything, adores her husband as much as ever?”
The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. “Then if she’s so
happy, please what’s the matter?”
It made his wife almost spring at him. “You think then she’s secretly
wretched?”
But he threw up his arms in deprecation. “Ah, my dear, I give them up to
YOU. I’ve nothing more to suggest.”
“Then it’s not sweet of you.” She spoke at present as if he were
frequently sweet. “You admit that it is ‘rum.’”
And this indeed fixed again, for a moment, his intention. “Has Charlotte
complained of the want of rooms for her friends?”
“Never, that I know of, a word. It isn’t the sort of thing she does. And
whom has she, after all,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to complain to?”
“Hasn’t she always you?”
“Oh, ‘me’! Charlotte and I, nowadays—!” She spoke as of a chapter
closed. “Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me, more and
more, as extraordinary.”
A deeper shade, at the renewal of the word, had come into the Colonel’s
face. “If they’re each and all so extraordinary then, isn’t that why one
must just resign one’s self to wash one’s hands of them—to be lost?”
Her face, however, so met the question as if it were but a flicker of
the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for—her charged
eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back,
alertly enough, to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light
of a plain man’s vision, but he must be something more than a plain man
now. “Hasn’t she then, Charlotte, always her husband—?”
“To complain to? She’d rather die.”
“Oh!”—and Bob Assingham’s face, at the vision of such extremities,
lengthened for very docility. “Hasn’t she the Prince then?”
“For such matters? Oh, he doesn’t count.”
“I thought that was just what—as the basis of our agitation—he does
do!”
Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. “Not a bit as a
person to bore with complaints. The ground of MY agitation is, exactly,
that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!” And in the
imagination of Mrs. Verver’s superiority to any such mistake she gave,
characteristically, something like a toss of her head—as marked a
tribute to that lady’s general grace, in all the conditions, as the
personage referred to doubtless had ever received.
“Ah, only Maggie!” With which the Colonel gave a short low gurgle. But
it found his wife again prepared.
“No—not only Maggie. A great many people in London—and small
wonder!—bore him.”
“Maggie only worst then?” But it was a question that he had promptly
dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly
before sown the seed. “You said just now that he would by this time be
back with Charlotte ‘if they HAVE arrived.’ You think it then possible
that they really won’t have returned?”
His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her
responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her from
entertaining it. “I think there’s nothing they’re not now capable of—in
their so intense good faith.”
“Good faith?”—he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an
odd ring, critically.
“Their false position. It comes to the same thing.” And she bore down,
with her decision, the superficial lack of sequence. “They may very
possibly, for a demonstration—as I see them—not have come back.”
He wondered, visibly, at this, how she did see them. “May have bolted
somewhere together?”
“May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have
wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me. May have done,” Fanny
Assingham continued, “God knows what!” She went on, suddenly, with more
emotion—which, at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision,
broke out in a wail of distress, imperfectly smothered. “Whatever
they’ve done I shall never know. Never, never—because I don’t want to,
and because nothing will induce me. So they may do as they like.
But I’ve worked for them ALL” She uttered this last with another
irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she
had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him.
She passed into the dusky drawing-room, where, during his own prowl,
shortly previous, he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of the
street-lamps came in a little at the window. She made for this
window, against which she leaned her head, while the Colonel, with his
lengthened face, looked after her for a minute and hesitated. He might
have been wondering what she had really done, to what extent, beyond his
knowledge or his conception, in the affairs of these people, she COULD
have committed herself. But to hear her cry, and yet try not to, was,
quickly enough, too much for him; he had known her at other times quite
not try not to, and that had not been so bad. He went to her and put his
arm round her; he drew her head to his breast, where, while she gasped,
she let it stay a little—all with a patience that presently stilled
her. Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close
their colloquy, with the natural result of sending them to bed: what was
between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp
show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were,
without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door
after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They
remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which
opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which let the
vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the
florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny’s drawing-room. And the beauty
of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her
burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort,
with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have
represented their sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the
mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle
alone—the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than
before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself.
What was the basis, which Fanny absolutely exacted, but that Charlotte
and the Prince must be saved—so far as consistently speaking of them
as still safe might save them? It did save them, somehow, for Fanny’s
troubled mind—for that was the nature of the mind of women. He conveyed
to her now, at all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had
sufficiently got the tip, and that the tip was all he had wanted. This
remained quite clear even when he presently reverted to what she had
told him of her recent passage with Maggie. “I don’t altogether see,
you know, what you infer from it, or why you infer anything.” When he
so expressed himself it was quite as if in possession of what they had
brought up from the depths.