Maggie’s new uneasiness might have had time to drop, inasmuch as she
not only was conscious, during several days that followed, of no fresh
indication for it to feed on, but was even struck, in quite another way,
with an augmentation of the symptoms of that difference she had taken it
into her head to work for. She recognised by the end of a week that if
she had been in a manner caught up her father had been not less so—with
the effect of her husband’s and his wife’s closing in, together, round
them, and of their all having suddenly begun, as a party of four, to
lead a life gregarious, and from that reason almost hilarious, so far
as the easy sound of it went, as never before. It might have been an
accident and a mere coincidence—so at least she said to herself at
first; but a dozen chances that furthered the whole appearance had risen
to the surface, pleasant pretexts, oh certainly pleasant, as pleasant
as Amerigo in particular could make them, for associated undertakings,
quite for shared adventures, for its always turning out, amusingly, that
they wanted to do very much the same thing at the same time and in the
same way. Funny all this was, to some extent, in the light of the fact
that the father and daughter, for so long, had expressed so few positive
desires; yet it would be sufficiently natural that if Amerigo and
Charlotte HAD at last got a little tired of each other’s company they
should find their relief not so much in sinking to the rather low level
of their companions as in wishing to pull the latter into the train
in which they so constantly moved. “We’re in the train,” Maggie mutely
reflected after the dinner in Eaton Square with Lady Castledean; “we’ve
suddenly waked up in it and found ourselves rushing along, very much
as if we had been put in during sleep—shoved, like a pair of labelled
boxes, into the van. And since I wanted to ‘go’ I’m certainly going,”
she might have added; “I’m moving without trouble—they’re doing it
all for us: it’s wonderful how they understand and how perfectly
it succeeds.” For that was the thing she had most immediately to
acknowledge: it seemed as easy for them to make a quartette as it had
formerly so long appeared for them to make a pair of couples—this
latter being thus a discovery too absurdly belated. The only point
at which, day after day, the success appeared at all qualified was
represented, as might have been said, by her irresistible impulse
to give her father a clutch when the train indulged in one of its
occasional lurches. Then—there was no denying it—his eyes and her own
met; so that they were themselves doing active violence, as against
the others, to that very spirit of union, or at least to that very
achievement of change, which she had taken the field to invoke.
The maximum of change was reached, no doubt, the day the Matcham party
dined in Portland Place; the day, really perhaps, of Maggie’s maximum of
social glory, in the sense of its showing for her own occasion, her
very own, with every one else extravagantly rallying and falling in,
absolutely conspiring to make her its heroine. It was as if her father
himself, always with more initiative as a guest than as a host, had
dabbled too in the conspiracy; and the impression was not diminished by
the presence of the Assinghams, likewise very much caught-up, now, after
something of a lull, by the side-wind of all the rest of the motion,
and giving our young woman, so far at least as Fanny was concerned, the
sense of some special intention of encouragement and applause. Fanny,
who had not been present at the other dinner, thanks to a preference
entertained and expressed by Charlotte, made a splendid show at this
one, in new orange-coloured velvet with multiplied turquoises, and
with a confidence, furthermore, as different as possible, her hostess
inferred, from her too-marked betrayal of a belittled state at Matcham.
Maggie was not indifferent to her own opportunity to redress this
balance—which seemed, for the hour, part of a general rectification;
she liked making out for herself that on the high level of Portland
Place, a spot exempt, on all sorts of grounds, from jealous
jurisdictions, her friend could feel as “good” as any one, and could
in fact at moments almost appear to take the lead in recognition and
celebration, so far as the evening might conduce to intensify the lustre
of the little Princess. Mrs. Assingham produced on her the impression
of giving her constantly her cue for this; and it was in truth partly
by her help, intelligently, quite gratefully accepted, that the
little Princess, in Maggie, was drawn out and emphasised. She couldn’t
definitely have said how it happened, but she felt herself, for the
first time in her career, living up to the public and popular notion
of such a personage, as it pressed upon her from all round; rather
wondering, inwardly too, while she did so, at that strange mixture in
things through which the popular notion could be evidenced for her by
such supposedly great ones of the earth as the Castledeans and their
kind. Fanny Assingham might really have been there, at all events, like
one of the assistants in the ring at the circus, to keep up the pace
of the sleek revolving animal on whose back the lady in short spangled
skirts should brilliantly caper and posture. That was all, doubtless
Maggie had forgotten, had neglected, had declined, to be the little
Princess on anything like the scale open to her; but now that the
collective hand had been held out to her with such alacrity, so that she
might skip up into the light, even, as seemed to her modest mind,
with such a show of pink stocking and such an abbreviation of white
petticoat, she could strike herself as perceiving, under arched
eyebrows, where her mistake had been. She had invited for the later
hours, after her dinner, a fresh contingent, the whole list of her
apparent London acquaintance—which was again a thing in the manner of
little princesses for whom the princely art was a matter of course. That
was what she was learning to do, to fill out as a matter of course her
appointed, her expected, her imposed character; and, though there were
latent considerations that somewhat interfered with the lesson, she
was having to-night an inordinate quantity of practice, none of it so
successful as when, quite wittingly, she directed it at Lady Castledean,
who was reduced by it at last to an unprecedented state of passivity.
The perception of this high result caused Mrs. Assingham fairly to flush
with responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend, from moment to
moment, quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had,
in some marvellous, sudden, supersubtle way, become a source of succour
to herself, become beautifully, divinely retributive. The intensity of
the taste of these registered phenomena was in fact that somehow, by
a process and through a connexion not again to be traced, she so
practised, at the same time, on Amerigo and Charlotte—with only the
drawback, her constant check and second-thought, that she concomitantly
practised perhaps still more on her father.
This last was a danger indeed that, for much of the ensuing time,
had its hours of strange beguilement—those at which her sense for
precautions so suffered itself to lapse that she felt her communion with
him more intimate than any other. It COULDN’T but pass between them that
something singular was happening—so much as this she again and again
said to herself; whereby the comfort of it was there, after all, to be
noted, just as much as the possible peril, and she could think of the
couple they formed together as groping, with sealed lips, but with
mutual looks that had never been so tender, for some freedom, some
fiction, some figured bravery, under which they might safely talk of
it. The moment was to come—and it finally came with an effect as
penetrating as the sound that follows the pressure of an electric
button—when she read the least helpful of meanings into the agitation
she had created. The merely specious description of their case would
have been that, after being for a long time, as a family, delightfully,
uninterruptedly happy, they had still had a new felicity to discover;
a felicity for which, blessedly, her father’s appetite and her own, in
particular, had been kept fresh and grateful. This livelier march of
their intercourse as a whole was the thing that occasionally determined
in him the clutching instinct we have glanced at; very much as if he had
said to her, in default of her breaking silence first: “Everything is
remarkably pleasant, isn’t it?—but WHERE, for it, after all, are we?
up in a balloon and whirling through space, or down in the depths of the
earth, in the glimmering passages of a gold-mine?” The equilibrium, the
precious condition, lasted in spite of rearrangement; there had been a
fresh distribution of the different weights, but the balance persisted
and triumphed: all of which was just the reason why she was forbidden,
face to face with the companion of her adventure, the experiment of a
test. If they balanced they balanced—she had to take that; it deprived
her of every pretext for arriving, by however covert a process, at what
he thought.
But she had her hours, thus, of feeling supremely linked to him by the
rigour of their law, and when it came over her that, all the while, the
wish, on his side, to spare her might be what most worked with him, this
very fact of their seeming to have nothing “inward” really to talk about
wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a
consecration, even in her yearning for her husband. She was powerless,
however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came,
when she would have been all ready to say to him, “Yes, this is by every
appearance the best time we’ve had yet; but don’t you see, all the same,
how they must be working together for it, and how my very success, my
success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round
to being their success, above all; their cleverness, their amiability,
their power to hold out, their complete possession, in short, of our
life?” For how could she say as much as that without saying a great deal
more? without saying “They’ll do everything in the world that suits
us, save only one thing—prescribe a line for us that will make them
separate.” How could she so much as imagine herself even faintly
murmuring that without putting into his mouth the very words that would
have made her quail? “Separate, my dear? Do you want them to separate?
Then you want US to—you and me? For how can the one separation take
place without the other?” That was the question that, in spirit, she had
heard him ask—with its dread train, moreover, of involved and connected
inquiries. Their own separation, his and hers, was of course perfectly
thinkable, but only on the basis of the sharpest of reasons. Well, the
sharpest, the very sharpest, would be that they could no longer afford,
as it were, he to let his wife, she to let her husband, “run” them in
such compact formation. And say they accepted this account of their
situation as a practical finality, acting upon it and proceeding to a
division, would no sombre ghosts of the smothered past, on either side,
show, across the widening strait, pale unappeased faces, or raise, in
the very passage, deprecating, denouncing hands?
Meanwhile, however such things might be, she was to have occasion to say
to herself that there might be but a deeper treachery in recoveries and
reassurances. She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue
of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting
the Castledeans in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her
with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come—the alarm, after all, was
yet to be confirmed. There came an hour, inevitably, when she knew, with
a chill, what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month
to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for
it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular
use that they might make, for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity,
of Charlotte. The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had
employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came
back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He
had been conscious, at the moment, of many things—conscious even, not a
little, of desiring; and thereby of needing, to see what she would do
in a given case. The given case would be that of her being to a certain
extent, as she might fairly make it out, MENACED—horrible as it was to
impute to him any intention represented by such a word. Why it was that
to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in
a question that seemed, just then and there, quite peculiarly their own
business—why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should, at the
worst, strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity
disconnected, for her, temporarily, from its grounds, the adventure
of an imagination within her that possibly had lost its way. That,
precisely, was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks
passed by, with a fair, or rather indeed with an excessive, imitation
of resumed serenity. There had been no prompt sequel to the Prince’s
equivocal light, and that made for patience; yet she was none the less
to have to admit, after delay, that the bread he had cast on the
waters had come home, and that she should thus be justified of her old
apprehension. The consequence of this, in turn, was a renewed pang in
presence of his remembered ingenuity. To be ingenious with HER—what
DIDN’T, what mightn’t that mean, when she had so absolutely never, at
any point of contact with him, put him, by as much as the value of a
penny, to the expense of sparing, doubting, fearing her, of having
in any way whatever to reckon with her? The ingenuity had been in his
simply speaking of their use of Charlotte as if it were common to them
in an equal degree, and his triumph, on the occasion, had been just in
the simplicity. She couldn’t—and he knew it—say what was true: “Oh,
you ‘use’ her, and I use her, if you will, yes; but we use her ever
so differently and separately—not at all in the same way or degree.
There’s nobody we really use together but ourselves, don’t you see?—by
which I mean that where our interests are the same I can so beautifully,
so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so
exquisitely serve me. The only person either of us needs is the other
of us; so why, as a matter of course, in such a case as this, drag in
Charlotte?”
She couldn’t so challenge him, because it would have been—and there she
was paralysed—the NOTE. It would have translated itself on the spot,
for his ear, into jealousy; and, from reverberation to repercussion,
would have reached her father’s exactly in the form of a cry piercing
the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as
difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as
it had formerly been easy; there had been in fact, of old—the time,
so strangely, seemed already far away—an inevitability in her longer
passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability,
round about them, of everything. But at present Charlotte was almost
always there when Amerigo brought her to Eaton Square, where Amerigo
was constantly bringing her; and Amerigo was almost always there when
Charlotte brought her husband to Portland Place, where Charlotte was
constantly bringing HIM. The fractions of occasions, the chance minutes
that put them face to face had, as yet, of late, contrived to count but
little, between them, either for the sense of opportunity or for that
of exposure; inasmuch as the lifelong rhythm of their intercourse made
against all cursory handling of deep things. They had never availed
themselves of any given quarter-of-an-hour to gossip about fundamentals;
they moved slowly through large still spaces; they could be silent
together, at any time, beautifully, with much more comfort than
hurriedly expressive. It appeared indeed to have become true that their
common appeal measured itself, for vividness, just by this economy of
sound; they might have been talking “at” each other when they talked
with their companions, but these latter, assuredly, were not in any
directer way to gain light on the current phase of their relation. Such
were some of the reasons for which Maggie suspected fundamentals, as
I have called them, to be rising, by a new movement, to the
surface—suspected it one morning late in May, when her father presented
himself in Portland Place alone. He had his pretext—of that she was
fully aware: the Principino, two days before, had shown signs, happily
not persistent, of a feverish cold and had notoriously been obliged to
spend the interval at home. This was ground, ample ground, for punctual
inquiry; but what it wasn’t ground for, she quickly found herself
reflecting, was his having managed, in the interest of his visit,
to dispense so unwontedly—as their life had recently come to be
arranged—with his wife’s attendance. It had so happened that she
herself was, for the hour, exempt from her husband’s, and it will at
once be seen that the hour had a quality all its own when I note that,
remembering how the Prince had looked in to say he was going out, the
Princess whimsically wondered if their respective sposi mightn’t frankly
be meeting, whimsically hoped indeed they were temporarily so disposed
of. Strange was her need, at moments, to think of them as not attaching
an excessive importance to their repudiation of the general practice
that had rested only a few weeks before on such a consecrated rightness.
Repudiations, surely, were not in the air—they had none of them come to
that; for wasn’t she at this minute testifying directly against them by
her own behaviour? When she should confess to fear of being alone with
her father, to fear of what he might then—ah, with such a slow, painful
motion as she had a horror of!—say to her, THEN would be time enough
for Amerigo and Charlotte to confess to not liking to appear to
foregather.
She had this morning a wonderful consciousness both of dreading a
particular question from him and of being able to check, yes even to
disconcert, magnificently, by her apparent manner of receiving it, any
restless imagination he might have about its importance. The day, bright
and soft, had the breath of summer; it made them talk, to begin with, of
Fawns, of the way Fawns invited—Maggie aware, the while, that in thus
regarding, with him, the sweetness of its invitation to one couple just
as much as to another, her humbugging smile grew very nearly convulsive.
That was it, and there was relief truly, of a sort, in taking it in:
she was humbugging him already, by absolute necessity, as she had never,
never done in her life—doing it up to the full height of what she
had allowed for. The necessity, in the great dimly-shining room where,
declining, for his reasons, to sit down, he moved about in Amerigo’s
very footsteps, the necessity affected her as pressing upon her with the
very force of the charm itself; of the old pleasantness, between them,
so candidly playing up there again; of the positive flatness of their
tenderness, a surface all for familiar use, quite as if generalised from
the long succession of tapestried sofas, sweetly faded, on which his
theory of contentment had sat, through unmeasured pauses, beside
her own. She KNEW, from this instant, knew in advance and as well
as anything would ever teach her, that she must never intermit for
a solitary second her so highly undertaking to prove that there was
nothing the matter with her. She saw, of a sudden, everything she might
say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connections from
it with any number of remote matters, struck herself, for instance, as
acting all in its interest when she proposed their going out, in the
exercise of their freedom and in homage to the season, for a turn in
the Regent’s Park. This resort was close at hand, at the top of Portland
Place, and the Principino, beautifully better, had already proceeded
there under high attendance: all of which considerations were defensive
for Maggie, all of which became, to her mind, part of the business of
cultivating continuity.
Upstairs, while she left him to put on something to go out in, the
thought of his waiting below for her, in possession of the empty house,
brought with it, sharply if briefly, one of her abrupt arrests of
consistency, the brush of a vain imagination almost paralysing her,
often, for the minute, before her glass—the vivid look, in other
words, of the particular difference his marriage had made. The
particular difference seemed at such instants the loss, more than
anything else, of their old freedom, their never having had to think,
where they were together concerned, of any one, of anything but each
other. It hadn’t been HER marriage that did it; that had never,
for three seconds, suggested to either of them that they must act
diplomatically, must reckon with another presence—no, not even with her
husband’s. She groaned to herself, while the vain imagination lasted,
“WHY did he marry? ah, why DID he?” and then it came up to her more than
ever that nothing could have been more beautiful than the way in which,
till Charlotte came so much more closely into their life, Amerigo hadn’t
interfered. What she had gone on owing him for this mounted up again,
to her eyes, like a column of figures—-or call it even, if one would,
a house of cards; it was her father’s wonderful act that had tipped the
house down and made the sum wrong. With all of which, immediately after
her question, her “Why did he, why did he?” rushed back, inevitably, the
confounding, the overwhelming wave of the knowledge of his reason. “He
did it for ME, he did it for me,” she moaned, “he did it, exactly, that
our freedom—meaning, beloved man, simply and solely mine—should be
greater instead of less; he did it, divinely, to liberate me so far as
possible from caring what became of him.” She found time upstairs,
even in her haste, as she had repeatedly found time before, to let
the wonderments involved in these recognitions flash at her with their
customary effect of making her blink: the question in especial of
whether she might find her solution in acting, herself, in the spirit of
what he had done, in forcing her “care” really to grow as much less as
he had tried to make it. Thus she felt the whole weight of their case
drop afresh upon her shoulders, was confronted, unmistakably, with the
prime source of her haunted state. It all came from her not having been
able not to mind—not to mind what became of him; not having been able,
without anxiety, to let him go his way and take his risk and lead his
life. She had made anxiety her stupid little idol; and absolutely now,
while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she
had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom
she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn’t
want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding
between them in consequence of which he should cut loose.
Very near indeed it looked, any such possibility! that consciousness,
too, had taken its turn by the time she was ready; all the vibration,
all the emotion of this present passage being, precisely, in the very
sweetness of their lapse back into the conditions of the simpler time,
into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the feeling of the
moment and those of numberless other moments that were sufficiently far
away. She had been quick in her preparation, in spite of the flow of the
tide that sometimes took away her breath; but a pause, once more, was
still left for her to make, a pause, at the top of the stairs, before
she came down to him, in the span of which she asked herself if it
weren’t thinkable, from the perfectly practical point of view, that
she should simply sacrifice him. She didn’t go into the detail of what
sacrificing him would mean—she didn’t need to; so distinct was it, in
one of her restless lights, that there he was awaiting her, that she
should find him walking up and down the drawing-room in the warm,
fragrant air to which the open windows and the abundant flowers
contributed; slowly and vaguely moving there and looking very slight
and young and, superficially, manageable, almost as much like her child,
putting it a little freely, as like her parent; with the appearance
about him, above all, of having perhaps arrived just on purpose to SAY
it to her, himself, in so many words: “Sacrifice me, my own love; do
sacrifice me, do sacrifice me!” Should she want to, should she insist on
it, she might verily hear him bleating it at her, all conscious and all
accommodating, like some precious, spotless, exceptionally intelligent
lamb. The positive effect of the intensity of this figure, however,
was to make her shake it away in her resumed descent; and after she had
rejoined him, after she had picked him up, she was to know the full
pang of the thought that her impossibility was MADE, absolutely, by his
consciousness, by the lucidity of his intention: this she felt while she
smiled there for him, again, all hypocritically; while she drew on
fair, fresh gloves; while she interrupted the process first to give
his necktie a slightly smarter twist and then to make up to him for
her hidden madness by rubbing her nose into his cheek according to the
tradition of their frankest levity.
From the instant she should be able to convict him of intending, every
issue would be closed and her hypocrisy would have to redouble. The
only way to sacrifice him would be to do so without his dreaming what
it might be for. She kissed him, she arranged his cravat, she dropped
remarks, she guided him out, she held his arm, not to be led, but to
lead him, and taking it to her by much the same intimate pressure she
had always used, when a little girl, to mark the inseparability of her
doll—she did all these things so that he should sufficiently fail to
dream of what they might be for.