“I can’t say more,” this made his companion reply, “than that something
in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in
her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I
felt her trying her very best—and her very best, poor duck, is very
good—to be quiet and natural. It’s when one sees people who always ARE
natural making little pale, pathetic, blinking efforts for it—then
it is that one knows something’s the matter. I can’t describe my
impression—you would have had it for yourself. And the only thing
that ever CAN be the matter with Maggie is that. By ‘that’ I mean her
beginning to doubt. To doubt, for the first time,” Mrs. Assingham wound
up, “of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world.”
It was impressive, Fanny’s vision, and the Colonel, as if himself
agitated by it, took another turn of prowling. “To doubt of fidelity—to
doubt of friendship! Poor duck indeed! It will go hard with her. But
she’ll put it all,” he concluded, “on Charlotte.”
Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a
headshake. “She won’t ‘put’ it anywhere. She won’t do with it anything
anyone else would. She’ll take it all herself.”
“You mean she’ll make it out her own fault?”
“Yes—she’ll find means, somehow, to arrive at that.”
“Ah then,” the Colonel dutifully declared, “she’s indeed a little
brick!”
“Oh,” his wife returned, “you’ll see, in one way or another, to what
tune!” And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation—so that,
as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. “She’ll
see me somehow through!”
“See YOU—?”
“Yes, me. I’m the worst. For,” said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder
exaltation, “I did it all. I recognise that—I accept it. She won’t
cast it up at me—she won’t cast up anything. So I throw myself upon
her—she’ll bear me up.” She spoke almost volubly—she held him with her
sudden sharpness. “She’ll carry the whole weight of us.”
There was still, nevertheless, wonder in it. “You mean she won’t mind? I
SAY, love—!” And he not unkindly stared. “Then where’s the difficulty?”
“There isn’t any!” Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis. It kept
him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer. “Ah,
you mean there isn’t any for US!”
She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed
a selfishness, a concern, at any cost, for their own surface. Then she
might have been deciding that their own surface was, after all, what
they had most to consider. “Not,” she said with dignity, “if we properly
keep our heads.” She appeared even to signify that they would begin by
keeping them now. This was what it was to have at last a constituted
basis. “Do you remember what you said to me that night of my first REAL
anxiety—after the Foreign Office party?”
“In the carriage—as we came home?” Yes—he could recall it. “Leave them
to pull through?”
“Precisely. ‘Trust their own wit,’ you practically said, ‘to save all
appearances.’ Well, I’ve trusted it. I HAVE left them to pull through.”
He hesitated. “And your point is that they’re not doing so?”
“I’ve left them,” she went on, “but now I see how and where. I’ve been
leaving them all the while, without knowing it, to HER.”
“To the Princess?”
“And that’s what I mean,” Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued. “That’s what
happened to me with her to-day,” she continued to explain. “It came home
to me that that’s what I’ve really been doing.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I needn’t torment myself. She has taken them over.”
The Colonel declared that he “saw”; yet it was as if, at this, he a
little sightlessly stared. “But what then has happened, from one day to
the other, to HER? What has opened her eyes?”
“They were never really shut. She misses him.”
“Then why hasn’t she missed him before?”
Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny
worked it out. “She did—but she wouldn’t let herself know it. She had
her reason—she wore her blind. Now, at last, her situation has come to
a head. To-day she does know it. And that’s illuminating. It has been,”
Mrs. Assingham wound up, “illuminating to ME.”
Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was
vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp. “Poor dear
little girl!”
“Ah no—don’t pity her!”
This did, however, pull him up. “We mayn’t even be sorry for her?”
“Not now—or at least not yet. It’s too soon—that is if it isn’t very
much too late. This will depend,” Mrs. Assingham went on; “at any rate
we shall see. We might have pitied her before—for all the good it would
then have done her; we might have begun some time ago. Now, however, she
has begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me—”
But again she projected her vision.
“The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she’ll like it!”
“The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is
that she’ll triumph.”
She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered
her husband. “Ah then, we must back her!”
“No—we mustn’t touch her. We mayn’t touch any of them. We must keep
our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait.
And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Assingham, “we must bear it as we can. That’s
where we are—and serves us right. We’re in presence.”
And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she
left it till he questioned again. “In presence of what?”
“Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come off.”
She had paused there before him while he wondered. “You mean she’ll get
the Prince back?”
She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been
almost abject. “It isn’t a question of recovery. It won’t be a question
of any vulgar struggle. To ‘get him back’ she must have lost him, and to
have lost him she must have had him.” With which Fanny shook her head.
“What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that, all the while,
she really HASN’T had him. Never.”
“Ah, my dear—!” the poor Colonel panted.
“Never!” his wife repeated. And she went on without pity. “Do you
remember what I said to you long ago—that evening, just before their
marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?”
The smile with which he met this appeal was not, it was to be feared,
robust. “What haven’t you, love, said in your time?”
“So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having once or
twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when
I put it to you, that evening, that Maggie was the person in the world
to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her
imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed, That
therefore,” Fanny continued, “is what will now HAVE to happen. Her sense
will have to open.”
“I see.” He nodded. “To the wrong.” He nodded again, almost
cheerfully—as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a
lunatic. “To the very, very wrong.”
But his wife’s spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain
higher. “To what’s called Evil—with a very big E: for the first time in
her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude
experience of it.” And she gave, for the possibility, the largest
measure. “To the harsh, bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath
of it. Unless indeed”—and here Mrs. Assingham noted a limit “unless
indeed, as yet (so far as she has come, and if she comes no further),
simply to the suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether that
mere dose of alarm will prove enough.”
He considered. “But enough for what then, dear—if not enough to break
her heart?”
“Enough to give her a shaking!” Mrs. Assingham rather oddly replied. “To
give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won’t break her heart.
It will make her,” she explained—“well, it will make her, by way of a
change, understand one or two things in the world.”
“But isn’t it a pity,” the Colonel asked, “that they should happen to be
the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her?”
“Oh, ‘disagreeable’—? They’ll have had to be disagreeable—to show her
a little where she is. They’ll have HAD to be disagreeable to make her
sit up. They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live.”
Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companion slowly
revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he seemed
vaguely to “time” her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time
to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was
doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his
eyes, for a minute, roll, as from the force of feeling, over the upper
dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife’s words
ideally implied.
“Decide to live—ah yes!—for her child.”
“Oh, bother her child!”—and he had never felt so snubbed, for an
exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. “To live, you poor
dear, for her father—which is another pair of sleeves!”
And Mrs. Assingham’s whole ample, ornamented person irradiated, with
this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. “Any
idiot can do things for her child. She’ll have a motive more original,
and we shall see how it will work her. She’ll have to save HIM.”
“To ‘save’ him—?”
“To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT”—and she seemed to see
it, before her, in her husband’s very eyes—“will be work cut out!”
With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their
colloquy. “Good night!”
There was something in her manner, however—or in the effect, at least,
of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch,
lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain
the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to
mount, with the ring of excited perception. “Ah, but, you know, that’s
rather jolly!”
“Jolly’—?” she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.
“I mean it’s rather charming.”
“‘Charming’—?” It had still to be their law, a little, that she was
tragic when he was comic.
“I mean it’s rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would be.
Only,” he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it
had suddenly touched with light for him connections hitherto dim—“only
I don’t quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to
such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so ‘rum,’ hasn’t also,
by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going
on.”
“Ah, there you are! It’s the question that I’ve all along been asking
myself.” She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as
she pursued—she let him have it straight. “And it’s the question of an
idiot.”
“An idiot—?”
“Well, the idiot that I’VE been, in all sorts of ways—so often, of
late, have I asked it. You’re excusable, since you ask it but now. The
answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me in the face.”
“Then what in the world is it?”
“Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him—the very passion
of her brave little piety. That’s the way it has worked,” Mrs. Assingham
explained “and I admit it to have been as ‘rum’ a way as possible.
But it has been working from a rum start. From the moment the dear
man married to ease his daughter off, and it then happened, by an
extraordinary perversity, that the very opposite effect was produced—!”
With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a
desperate shrug.
“I see,” the Colonel sympathetically mused. “That WAS a rum start.”
But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make
her sense, for a moment, intolerable. “Yes—there I am! I was really at
the bottom of it,” she declared; “I don’t know what possessed me—but I
planned for him, I goaded him on.” With which, however, the next moment,
she took herself up. “Or, rather, I DO know what possessed me—for
wasn’t he beset with ravening women, right and left, and didn’t he,
quite pathetically, appeal for protection, didn’t he, quite charmingly,
show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie,” she thus lucidly
continued, “couldn’t, with a new life of her own, give herself up to
doing for him in the future all she had done in the past—to fencing him
in, to keeping him safe and keeping THEM off. One perceived this,” she
went on—“out of the abundance of one’s affection and one’s sympathy.”
It all blessedly came back to her—when it wasn’t all, for the
fiftieth time, obscured, in face of the present facts, by anxiety and
compunction. “One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always IS, to
think one sees people’s lives for them better than they see them for
themselves. But one’s excuse here,” she insisted, “was that these people
clearly DIDN’T see them for themselves—didn’t see them at all. It
struck one for very pity—that they were making a mess of such charming
material; that they were but wasting it and letting it go. They didn’t
know HOW to live—and somehow one couldn’t, if one took an interest in
them at all, simply stand and see it. That’s what I pay for”—and the
poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion’s intelligence
at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let
him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness. “I always pay for
it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest.
Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on
Charlotte—Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives,
when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them,
and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure, just as,
for any possible good to the WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It
began to come over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was
a person who COULD keep off ravening women—without being one herself,
either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr.
Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something,
of course, that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I
mean—it looks at me,” she veritably moaned, “out of your face! But all
I can say is that it didn’t; the reason largely being—once I had fallen
in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan—that I seemed to feel
sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn’t quite make out
either what other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of
her accepting.”
“I see—I see.” She had paused, meeting all the while his listening
look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that
the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with
cooling breath. “One quite understands, my dear.”
It only, however, kept her there sombre. “I naturally see, love, what
you understand; which sits again, perfectly, in your eyes. You see
that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes,
dearest”—and the grimness of her dreariness suddenly once more
possessed her: “you’ve only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason
for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see,” she
said with an ineffable headshake, “that I don’t stand up! I’m down,
down, down,” she declared; “yet” she as quickly added—“there’s just one
little thing that helps to save my life.” And she kept him waiting but
an instant. “They might easily—they would perhaps even certainly—have
done something worse.”
He thought. “Worse than that Charlotte—?”
“Ah, don’t tell me,” she cried, “that there COULD have been nothing
worse. There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in
her way, is extraordinary.”
He was almost simultaneous. “Extraordinary!”
“She observes the forms,” said Fanny Assingham.
He hesitated. “With the Prince—?”
“FOR the Prince. And with the others,” she went on. “With Mr.
Verver—wonderfully. But above all with Maggie. And the forms”—she had
to do even THEM justice—“are two-thirds of conduct. Say he had married
a woman who would have made a hash of them.”
But he jerked back. “Ah, my dear, I wouldn’t say it for the world!”
“Say,” she none the less pursued, “he had married a woman the Prince
would really have cared for.”
“You mean then he doesn’t care for Charlotte—?” This was still a new
view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of
the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed
him time; at the end of which she simply said: “No!”
“Then what on earth are they up to?” Still, however, she only looked at
him; so that, standing there before her with his hands in his pockets,
he had time, further, to risk, soothingly, another question. “Are the
‘forms’ you speak of—that are two-thirds of conduct—what will be
keeping her now, by your hypothesis, from coming home with him till
morning?”
“Yes—absolutely. THEIR forms.”
“‘Theirs’—?”
“Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s—those they IMPOSE on Charlotte and the
Prince. Those,” she developed, “that, so perversely, as I say, have
succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones.”
He considered—but only now, at last, really to relapse into woe. “Your
‘perversity,’ my dear, is exactly what I don’t understand. The state
of things existing hasn’t grown, like a field of mushrooms, in a night.
Whatever they, all round, may be in for now is at least the consequence
of what they’ve DONE. Are they mere helpless victims of fate?”
Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it, “Yes—they are. To be so
abjectly innocent—that IS to be victims of fate.”
“And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent—?”
It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. “Yes.
That is they WERE—as much so in their way as the others. There were
beautiful intentions all round. The Prince’s and Charlotte’s were
beautiful—of THAT I had my faith. They WERE—I’d go to the stake.
Otherwise,” she added, “I should have been a wretch. And I’ve not been a
wretch. I’ve only been a double-dyed donkey.”
“Ah then,” he asked, “what does our muddle make THEM to have been?”
“Well, too much taken up with considering each other. You may call such
a mistake as that by what ever name you please; it at any rate means,
all round, their case. It illustrates the misfortune,” said Mrs.
Assingham gravely, “of being too, too charming.”
This was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel again
did his best. “Yes, but to whom?—doesn’t it rather depend on that? To
whom have the Prince and Charlotte then been too charming?”
“To each other, in the first place—obviously. And then both of them
together to Maggie.”
“To Maggie?” he wonderingly echoed.
“To Maggie.” She was now crystalline. “By having accepted, from the
first, so guilelessly—yes, so guilelessly, themselves—her guileless
idea of still having her father, of keeping him fast, in her life.”
“Then isn’t one supposed, in common humanity, and if one hasn’t
quarrelled with him, and one has the means, and he, on his side, doesn’t
drink or kick up rows—isn’t one supposed to keep one’s aged parent in
one’s life?”
“Certainly—when there aren’t particular reasons against it. That there
may be others than his getting drunk is exactly the moral of what is
before us. In the first place Mr. Verver isn’t aged.”
The Colonel just hung fire—but it came. “Then why the deuce does
he—oh, poor dear man!—behave as if he were?”
She took a moment to meet it. “How do you know how he behaves?”
“Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does!” Again, at this, she
faltered; but again she rose. “Ah, isn’t my whole point that he’s
charming to her?”
“Doesn’t it depend a bit on what she regards as charming?”
She faced the question as if it were flippant, then with a headshake of
dignity she brushed it away. “It’s Mr. Verver who’s really young—it’s
Charlotte who’s really old. And what I was saying,” she added, “isn’t
affected!”
“You were saying”—he did her the justice—“that they’re all guileless.”
“That they were. Guileless, all, at first—quite extraordinarily. It’s
what I mean by their failure to see that the more they took for granted
they could work together the more they were really working apart. For I
repeat,” Fanny went on, “that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince
honestly to have made up their minds, originally, that their very esteem
for Mr. Verver—which was serious, as well it might be!—would save
them.”
“I see.” The Colonel inclined himself. “And save HIM.”
“It comes to the same thing!”
“Then save Maggie.”
“That comes,” said Mrs. Assingham, “to something a little different. For
Maggie has done the most.”
He wondered. “What do you call the most?”
“Well, she did it originally—she began the vicious circle. For
that—though you make round eyes at my associating her with ‘vice’—is
simply what it has been. It’s their mutual consideration, all round,
that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they’re really so embroiled
but because, in their way, they’ve been so improbably GOOD.”
“In their way—yes!” the Colonel grinned.
“Which was, above all, Maggie’s way.” No flicker of his ribaldry was
anything to her now. “Maggie had in the first place to make up to her
father for her having suffered herself to become—poor little dear,
as she believed—so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her
husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent
together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to
do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment,
whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path—by
instalments, as it were—in proportion as she herself, making sure her
father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the
same time, however,” Mrs. Assingham further explained, “by so much as
she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver,
by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made
up for. It has saddled her, you will easily see, with a positively new
obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her
unfortunate, even if quite heroic, little sense of justice. She began
with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever
temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext
for deserting or neglecting HIM. Then that, in its order, entailed
her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other
desire—this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little
daughter she had always been—involved in some degree, and just for the
present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold,”
Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, “that a person can
mostly feel but one passion—one TENDER passion, that is—at a
time. Only, that doesn’t hold good for our primary and instinctive
attachments, the ‘voice of blood,’ such as one’s feeling for a parent
or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other
intensities—as you will recognise, my dear, when you remember how I
continued, tout betement, to adore my mother, whom you didn’t adore, for
years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie”—she kept it up—“is
in the same situation as I was, PLUS complications from which I was,
thank heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication, above all, of not having in
the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have
had. Before she knew it, at any rate, her little scruples and her little
lucidities, which were really so divinely blind—her feverish little
sense of justice, as I say—had brought the two others together as her
grossest misconduct couldn’t have done. And now she knows something or
other has happened—yet hasn’t heretofore known what. She has only
piled up her remedy, poor child—something that she has earnestly but
confusedly seen as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy,
on top of the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself, and
that would really have needed, since then, so much modification. Her
only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her
father’s wondering if all, in their life in common, MAY be so certainly
for the best. She has now as never before to keep him unconscious that,
peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their situation is, there’s
anything in it all uncomfortable or disagreeable, anything morally the
least out of the way. She has to keep touching it up to make it, each
day, each month, look natural and normal to him; so that—God forgive me
the comparison!—she’s like an old woman who has taken to ‘painting’ and
who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater audacity,
with a greater impudence even, the older she grows.” And Fanny stood a
moment captivated with the image she had thrown off. “I like the idea of
Maggie audacious and impudent—learning to be so to gloss things over.
She could—she even will, yet, I believe—learn it, for that sacred
purpose, consummately, diabolically. For from the moment the dear man
should see it’s all rouge—!” She paused, staring at the vision.
It imparted itself even to Bob. “Then the fun would begin?” As it but
made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his inquiry.
“You mean that in that case she WILL, charming creature, be lost?”
She was silent a moment more. “As I’ve told you before, she won’t be
lost if her father’s saved. She’ll see that as salvation enough.”
The Colonel took it in. “Then she’s a little heroine.”
“Rather—she’s a little heroine. But it’s his innocence, above all,”
Mrs. Assingham added, “that will pull them through.”
Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver’s innocence. “It’s
awfully quaint.”
“Of course it’s awfully quaint! That it’s awfully quaint, that the pair
are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness—by which I
don’t mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet countrypeople, from
whom I’ve so deplorably degenerated—that,” Mrs. Assingham declared,
“was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my
interest in them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still,” she
rather ruefully subjoined, “before they’ve done with me!”
This might be, but it wasn’t what most stood in the Colonel’s way. “You
believe so in Mr. Verver’s innocence after two years of Charlotte?”
She stared. “But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are
what he hasn’t really—or what you may call undividedly—had.”
“Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has ‘really or undividedly,’
had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn’t had,” the Colonel
conceded, “to account for the innocence that in her, too, so leaves us
in admiration.”
So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. “It takes a great
many things to account for Maggie. What is definite, at all events, is
that—strange though this be—her effort for her father has, up to now,
sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, accept the
tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of
the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were,
exquisitely humbugged—the Principino, in whom he delights, always
aiding—he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his
life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn’t worked them
out in detail—any more than I had, heaven pity me!—and the queerness
has been, exactly, in the detail. This, for him, is what it was to have
married Charlotte. And they both,” she neatly wound up, “‘help.’”
“‘Both’—?”
“I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all
so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part
is very large. Charlotte,” Fanny declared, “works like a horse.”
So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it.
“And what does the Prince work like?”
She fixed him in return. “Like a Prince!” Whereupon, breaking short off,
to ascend to her room, she presented her highly—decorated back—in
which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the
ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint
symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her
argument.
He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her
mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before
them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life—as
life had shrunk for him now—the most luminous of wives. He turned off,
in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little
electric lamp which had presided over their talk; then he went up as
immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making
out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself
a relief—how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition
sustained and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above,
where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she
had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ
of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer—there was another plum
in the pie. “What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for
Charlotte?”
“The Prince’s? By his not ‘really’ caring?” She recalled, after a
little, benevolently enough. “I mean that men don’t, when it has all
been too easy. That’s how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated
who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he works,” she added;
“but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays.”
Well, he made it up. “Like a Prince?”
“Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that,” she said with
expression, “he’s—beautifully—a case. They’re far rarer, even in the
‘highest circles,’ than they pretend to be—and that’s what makes so
much of his value. He’s perhaps one of the very last—the last of the
real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round.”
The Colonel considered. “And how must Charlotte—if anything
happens—take him?”
The question held her a minute, and while she waited, with her eyes on
him, she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which
he felt her answer distinctly enough registered. Thus she gave him,
standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had
ever received from her. “Nothing—in spite of everything—WILL happen.
Nothing HAS happened. Nothing IS happening.”
He looked a trifle disappointed. “I see. For US.”
“For us. For whom else?” And he was to feel indeed how she wished him
to understand it. “We know nothing on earth—!” It was an undertaking he
must sign.
So he wrote, as it were, his name. “We know nothing on earth.” It was
like the soldiers’ watchword at night.
“We’re as innocent,” she went on in the same way, “as babes.”
“Why not rather say,” he asked, “as innocent as they themselves are?”
“Oh, for the best of reasons! Because we’re much more so.”
He wondered. “But how can we be more—?”
“For them? Oh, easily! We can be anything.”
“Absolute idiots then?”
“Absolute idiots. And oh,” Fanny breathed, “the way it will rest us!”
Well, he looked as if there were something in that. “But won’t they know
we’re not?”
She barely hesitated. “Charlotte and the Prince think we are—which is
so much gained. Mr. Verver believes in our intelligence—but he doesn’t
matter.”
“And Maggie? Doesn’t SHE know—?”
“That we see before our noses?” Yes, this indeed took longer. “Oh, so
far as she may guess it she’ll give no sign. So it comes to the same
thing.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Comes to our not being able to help her?”
“That’s the way we SHALL help her.”
“By looking like fools?”
She threw up her hands. “She only wants, herself, to look like a bigger!
So there we are!” With which she brushed it away—his conformity was
promised. Something, however, still held her; it broke, to her own
vision, as a last wave of clearness. “Moreover NOW,” she said, “I see! I
mean,” she added,—“what you were asking me: how I knew to-day, in Eaton
Square, that Maggie’s awake.” And she had indeed visibly got it. “It was
by seeing them together.”
“Seeing her with her father?” He fell behind again. “But you’ve seen her
often enough before.”
“Never with my present eyes. For nothing like such a test—that of this
length of the others’ absence together—has hitherto occurred.”
“Possibly! But if she and Mr. Verver insisted upon it—?”
“Why is it such a test? Because it has become one without their
intending it. It has spoiled, so to speak, on their hands.”
“It has soured, eh?” the Colonel said.
“The word’s horrible—say rather it has ‘changed.’ Perhaps,” Fanny went
on, “she did wish to see how much she can bear. In that case she HAS
seen. Only it was she alone who—about the visit—insisted. Her father
insists on nothing. And she watches him do it.”
Her husband looked impressed. “Watches him?”
“For the first faint sign. I mean of his noticing. It doesn’t, as I tell
you, come. But she’s there for it to see. And I felt,” she continued,
“HOW she’s there; I caught her, as it were, in the fact. She couldn’t
keep it from me—though she left her post on purpose—came home with
me to throw dust in my eyes. I took it all—her dust; but it was what
showed me.” With which supreme lucidity she reached the door of her
room. “Luckily it showed me also how she has succeeded. Nothing—from
him—HAS come.”
“You’re so awfully sure?”
“Sure. Nothing WILL. Good-night,” she said. “She’ll die first.”