There was nothing to show that her effort in any degree fell short till
they got well into the Park and he struck her as giving, unexpectedly,
the go-by to any serious search for the Principino. The way they sat
down awhile in the sun was a sign of that; his dropping with her into
the first pair of sequestered chairs they came across and waiting a
little, after they were placed, as if now at last she might bring out,
as between them, something more specific. It made her but feel the more
sharply how the specific, in almost any direction, was utterly forbidden
her—how the use of it would be, for all the world, like undoing the
leash of a dog eager to follow up a scent. It would come out, the
specific, where the dog would come out; would run to earth, somehow, the
truth—for she was believing herself in relation to the truth!—at which
she mustn’t so much as indirectly point. Such, at any rate, was the
fashion in which her passionate prudence played over possibilities of
danger, reading symptoms and betrayals into everything she looked at,
and yet having to make it evident, while she recognised them, that she
didn’t wince. There were moments between them, in their chairs, when
he might have been watching her guard herself and trying to think of
something new that would trip her up. There were pauses during which,
with her affection as sweet and still as the sunshine, she might yet,
as at some hard game, over a table, for money, have been defying him to
fasten upon her the least little complication of consciousness. She was
positively proud, afterwards, of the great style in which she had kept
this up; later on, at the hour’s end, when they had retraced their steps
to find Amerigo and Charlotte awaiting them at the house, she was able
to say to herself that, truly, she had put her plan through; even though
once more setting herself the difficult task of making their relation,
every minute of the time, not fall below the standard of that other
hour, in the treasured past, which hung there behind them like a framed
picture in a museum, a high watermark for the history of their old
fortune; the summer evening, in the park at Fawns, when, side by side
under the trees just as now, they had let their happy confidence lull
them with its most golden tone. There had been the possibility of a trap
for her, at present, in the very question of their taking up anew that
residence; wherefore she had not been the first to sound it, in spite of
the impression from him of his holding off to see what she would do. She
was saying to herself in secret: “CAN we again, in this form, migrate
there? Can I, for myself, undertake it? face all the intenser keeping-up
and stretching-out, indefinitely, impossibly, that our conditions in the
country, as we’ve established and accepted them, would stand for?”
She had positively lost herself in this inward doubt—so much she was
subsequently to remember; but remembering then too that her companion,
though perceptibly perhaps as if not to be eager, had broken the ice
very much as he had broken it in Eaton Square after the banquet to the
Castledeans.
Her mind had taken a long excursion, wandered far into the vision of
what a summer at Fawns, with Amerigo and Charlotte still more eminently
in presence against that higher sky, would bring forth. Wasn’t her
father meanwhile only pretending to talk of it? just as she was, in a
manner, pretending to listen? He got off it, finally, at all events,
for the transition it couldn’t well help thrusting out at him; it had
amounted exactly to an arrest of her private excursion by the sense that
he had begun to IMITATE—oh, as never yet!—the ancient tone of gold. It
had verily come from him at last, the question of whether she thought it
would be very good—but very good indeed—that he should leave England
for a series of weeks, on some pretext, with the Prince. Then it had
been that she was to know her husband’s “menace” hadn’t really dropped,
since she was face to face with the effect of it. Ah, the effect of it
had occupied all the rest of their walk, had stayed out with them and
come home with them, besides making it impossible that they shouldn’t
presently feign to recollect how rejoining the child had been their
original purpose. Maggie’s uneffaced note was that it had, at the end
of five minutes more, driven them to that endeavour as to a refuge, and
caused them afterwards to rejoice, as well, that the boy’s irrepressibly
importunate company, in due course secured and enjoyed, with
the extension imparted by his governess, a person expectant of
consideration, constituted a cover for any awkwardness. For that was
what it had all come to, that the dear man had spoken to her to TRY
her—quite as he had been spoken to himself by Charlotte, with the same
fine idea. The Princess took it in, on the spot, firmly grasping it;
she heard them together, her father and his wife, dealing with the queer
case. “The Prince tells me that Maggie has a plan for your taking some
foreign journey with him, and, as he likes to do everything she wants,
he has suggested my speaking to you for it as the thing most likely to
make you consent. So I do speak—see?—being always so eager myself,
as you know, to meet Maggie’s wishes. I speak, but without quite
understanding, this time, what she has in her head. Why SHOULD she, of
a sudden, at this particular moment, desire to ship you off together and
to remain here alone with me? The compliment’s all to me, I admit, and
you must decide quite as you like. The Prince is quite ready, evidently,
to do his part—but you’ll have it out with him. That is you’ll have
it out with HER.” Something of that kind was what, in her mind’s ear,
Maggie heard—and this, after his waiting for her to appeal to him
directly, was her father’s invitation to her to have it out. Well, as
she could say to herself all the rest of the day, that was what they did
while they continued to sit there in their penny chairs, that was what
they HAD done as much as they would now ever, ever, have out anything.
The measure of this, at least, had been given, that each would fight to
the last for the protection, for the perversion, of any real anxiety.
She had confessed, instantly, with her humbugging grin, not flinching by
a hair, meeting his eyes as mildly as he met hers, she had confessed
to her fancy that they might both, he and his son-in-law, have welcomed
such an escapade, since they had both been so long so furiously
domestic. She had almost cocked her hat under the inspiration of this
opportunity to hint how a couple of spirited young men, reacting from
confinement and sallying forth arm-in-arm, might encounter the agreeable
in forms that would strike them for the time at least as novel. She had
felt for fifty seconds, with her eyes, all so sweetly and falsely, in
her companion’s, horribly vulgar; yet without minding it either—such
luck should she have if to be nothing worse than vulgar would see her
through. “And I thought Amerigo might like it better,” she had said,
“than wandering off alone.”
“Do you mean that he won’t go unless I take him?”
She had considered here, and never in her life had she considered so
promptly and so intently. If she really put it that way, her husband,
challenged, might belie the statement; so that what would that do but
make her father wonder, make him perhaps ask straight out, why she was
exerting pressure? She couldn’t of course afford to be suspected for an
instant of exerting pressure; which was why she was obliged only to make
answer: “Wouldn’t that be just what you must have out with HIM?”
“Decidedly—if he makes me the proposal. But he hasn’t made it yet.”
Oh, once more, how she was to feel she had smirked! “Perhaps he’s too
shy!”
“Because you’re so sure he so really wants my company?”
“I think he has thought you might like it.”
“Well, I should—!” But with this he looked away from her, and she
held her breath to hear him either ask if she wished him to address
the question to Amerigo straight, or inquire if she should be greatly
disappointed by his letting it drop. What had “settled” her, as she was
privately to call it, was that he had done neither of these things, and
had thereby markedly stood off from the risk involved in trying to draw
out her reason. To attenuate, on the other hand, this appearance, and
quite as if to fill out the too large receptacle made, so musingly,
by his abstention, he had himself presently given her a reason—had
positively spared her the effort of asking whether he judged Charlotte
not to have approved. He had taken everything on himself—THAT was what
had settled her. She had had to wait very little more to feel, with
this, how much he was taking. The point he made was his lack of any
eagerness to put time and space, on any such scale, between himself and
his wife. He wasn’t so unhappy with her—far from it, and Maggie was to
hold that he had grinned back, paternally, through his rather shielding
glasses, in easy emphasis of this—as to be able to hint that he
required the relief of absence. Therefore, unless it was for the Prince
himself—!
“Oh, I don’t think it would have been for Amerigo himself. Amerigo and
I,” Maggie had said, “perfectly rub on together.”
“Well then, there we are.”
“I see”—and she had again, with sublime blandness, assented. “There we
are.”
“Charlotte and I too,” her father had gaily proceeded, “perfectly rub on
together.” And then he had appeared for a little to be making time. “To
put it only so,” he had mildly and happily added—“to put it only so!”
He had spoken as if he might easily put it much better, yet as if the
humour of contented understatement fairly sufficed for the occasion.
He had played then, either all consciously or all unconsciously,
into Charlotte’s hands; and the effect of this was to render trebly
oppressive Maggie’s conviction of Charlotte’s plan. She had done what
she wanted, his wife had—which was also what Amerigo had made her do.
She had kept her test, Maggie’s test, from becoming possible, and had
applied instead a test of her own. It was exactly as if she had known
that her stepdaughter would be afraid to be summoned to say, under the
least approach to cross-examination, why any change was desirable; and
it was, for our young woman herself, still more prodigiously, as if
her father had been capable of calculations to match, of judging it
important he shouldn’t be brought to demand of her what was the matter
with her. Why otherwise, with such an opportunity, hadn’t he demanded
it? Always from calculation—that was why, that was why. He was
terrified of the retort he might have invoked: “What, my dear, if you
come to that, is the matter with YOU?” When, a minute later on, he had
followed up his last note by a touch or two designed still further to
conjure away the ghost of the anomalous, at that climax verily she
would have had to be dumb to the question. “There seems a kind of charm,
doesn’t there? on our life—and quite as if, just lately, it had got
itself somehow renewed, had waked up refreshed. A kind of wicked selfish
prosperity perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything,
down to the last lovely object for the last glass case of the last
corner, left over, of my old show. That’s the only take-off, that it has
made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid—lying like gods together, all
careless of mankind.”
“Do you consider that we’re languid?”—that form of rejoinder she had
jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness. “Do you consider that
we are careless of mankind?—living as we do in the biggest crowd in the
world, and running about always pursued and pursuing.”
It had made him think indeed a little longer than she had meant; but he
came up again, as she might have said, smiling. “Well, I don’t know. We
get nothing but the fun, do we?”
“No,” she had hastened to declare; “we certainly get nothing but the
fun.”
“We do it all,” he had remarked, “so beautifully.”
“We do it all so beautifully.” She hadn’t denied this for a moment. “I
see what you mean.”
“Well, I mean too,” he had gone on, “that we haven’t, no doubt, enough,
the sense of difficulty.”
“Enough? Enough for what?”
“Enough not to be selfish.”
“I don’t think YOU are selfish,” she had returned—and had managed not
to wail it.
“I don’t say that it’s me particularly—or that it’s you or Charlotte or
Amerigo. But we’re selfish together—we move as a selfish mass. You see
we want always the same thing,” he had gone on—“and that holds us, that
binds us, together. We want each other,” he had further explained; “only
wanting it, each time, FOR each other. That’s what I call the happy
spell; but it’s also, a little, possibly, the immorality.”
“‘The immorality’?” she had pleasantly echoed.
“Well, we’re tremendously moral for ourselves—that is for each other;
and I won’t pretend that I know exactly at whose particular personal
expense you and I, for instance, are happy. What it comes to, I daresay,
is that there’s something haunting—as if it were a bit uncanny—in
such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege. Unless
indeed,” he had rambled on, “it’s only I to whom, fantastically, it says
so much. That’s all I mean, at any rate—that it’s sort of soothing;
as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and
seeing visions. ‘Let us then be up and doing’—what is it Longfellow
says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking
in—into our opium den—to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is, at
the same time, that we ARE doing; we’re doing, that is, after all, what
we went in for. We’re working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may
call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We HAVE worked
it, and what more can you do than that? It’s a good deal for me,” he
had wound up, “to have made Charlotte so happy—to have so perfectly
contented her. YOU, from a good way back, were a matter of course—I
mean your being all right; so that I needn’t mind your knowing that my
great interest, since then, has rather inevitably been in making sure of
the same success, very much to your advantage as well, for Charlotte. If
we’ve worked our life, our idea really, as I say—if at any rate I can
sit here and say that I’ve worked my share of it—it has not been what
you may call least by our having put Charlotte so at her ease. THAT has
been soothing, all round; that has curled up as the biggest of the blue
fumes, or whatever they are, of the opium. Don’t you see what a cropper
we would have come if she hadn’t settled down as she has?” And he had
concluded by turning to Maggie as for something she mightn’t really have
thought of. “You, darling, in that case, I verily believe, would have
been the one to hate it most.”
“To hate it—?” Maggie had wondered.
“To hate our having, with our tremendous intentions, not brought it off.
And I daresay I should have hated it for you even more than for myself.”
“That’s not unlikely perhaps when it was for me, after all, that you did
it.”
He had hesitated, but only a moment. “I never told you so.”
“Well, Charlotte herself soon enough told me.”
“But I never told HER,” her father had answered.
“Are you very sure?” she had presently asked.
“Well, I like to think how thoroughly I was taken with her, and how
right I was, and how fortunate, to have that for my basis. I told her
all the good I thought of her.”
“Then that,” Maggie had returned, “was precisely part of the good.
I mean it was precisely part of it that she could so beautifully
understand.”
“Yes—understand everything.”
“Everything—and in particular your reasons. Her telling me—that showed
me how she had understood.”
They were face to face again now, and she saw she had made his colour
rise; it was as if he were still finding in her eyes the concrete image,
the enacted scene, of her passage with Charlotte, which he was now
hearing of for the first time and as to which it would have been natural
he should question her further. His forbearance to do so would but
mark, precisely, the complication of his fears. “What she does like,” he
finally said, “is the way it has succeeded.”
“Your marriage?”
“Yes—my whole idea. The way I’ve been justified. That’s the joy I give
her. If for HER, either, it had failed—!” That, however, was not worth
talking about; he had broken off. “You think then you could now risk
Fawns?”
“‘Risk’ it?”
“Well, morally—from the point of view I was talking of; that of our
sinking deeper into sloth. Our selfishness, somehow, seems at its
biggest down there.”
Maggie had allowed him the amusement of her not taking this up. “Is
Charlotte,” she had simply asked, “really ready?”
“Oh, if you and I and Amerigo are. Whenever one corners Charlotte,” he
had developed more at his ease, “one finds that she only wants to know
what we want. Which is what we got her for!”
“What we got her for—exactly!” And so, for a little, even though with
a certain effect of oddity in their more or less successful ease, they
left it; left it till Maggie made the remark that it was all the same
wonderful her stepmother should be willing, before the season was out,
to exchange so much company for so much comparative solitude.
“Ah,” he had then made answer, “that’s because her idea, I think, this
time, is that we shall have more people, more than we’ve hitherto had,
in the country. Don’t you remember that THAT, originally, was what we
were to get her for?”
“Oh yes—to give us a life.” Maggie had gone through the form of
recalling this, and the light of their ancient candour, shining from so
far back, had seemed to bring out some things so strangely that, with
the sharpness of the vision, she had risen to her feet. “Well, with a
‘life’ Fawns will certainly do.” He had remained in his place while she
looked over his head; the picture, in her vision, had suddenly swarmed.
The vibration was that of one of the lurches of the mystic train in
which, with her companion, she was travelling; but she was having to
steady herself, this time, before meeting his eyes. She had measured
indeed the full difference between the move to Fawns because each of
them now knew the others wanted it and the pairing-off, for a journey,
of her husband and her father, which nobody knew that either wanted.
“More company” at Fawns would be effectually enough the key in which her
husband and her stepmother were at work; there was truly no question but
that she and her father must accept any array of visitors. No one could
try to marry him now. What he had just said was a direct plea for that,
and what was the plea itself but an act of submission to Charlotte? He
had, from his chair, been noting her look, but he had, the next minute,
also risen, and then it was they had reminded each other of their having
come out for the boy. Their junction with him and with his companion
successfully effected, the four had moved home more slowly, and still
more vaguely; yet with a vagueness that permitted of Maggie’s reverting
an instant to the larger issue.
“If we have people in the country then, as you were saying, do you know
for whom my first fancy would be? You may be amused, but it would be for
the Castledeans.”
“I see. But why should I be amused?”
“Well, I mean I am myself. I don’t think I like her—and yet I like to
see her: which, as Amerigo says, is ‘rum.’”
“But don’t you feel she’s very handsome?” her father inquired.
“Yes, but it isn’t for that.”
“Then what is it for?”
“Simply that she may be THERE—just there before us. It’s as if she may
have a value—as if something may come of her. I don’t in the least know
what, and she rather irritates me meanwhile. I don’t even know, I admit,
why—but if we see her often enough I may find out.”
“Does it matter so very much?” her companion had asked while they moved
together.
She had hesitated. “You mean because you do rather like her?”
He on his side too had waited a little, but then he had taken it from
her. “Yes, I guess I do rather like her.”
Which she accepted for the first case she could recall of their not
being affected by a person in the same way. It came back therefore
to his pretending; but she had gone far enough, and to add to her
appearance of levity she further observed that, though they were so
far from a novelty, she should also immediately desire, at Fawns, the
presence of the Assinghams. That put everything on a basis independent
of explanations; yet it was extraordinary, at the same time, how much,
once in the country again with the others, she was going, as they used
to say at home, to need the presence of the good Fanny. It was the
strangest thing in the world, but it was as if Mrs. Assingham might in a
manner mitigate the intensity of her consciousness of Charlotte. It was
as if the two would balance, one against the other; as if it came round
again in that fashion to her idea of the equilibrium. It would be like
putting this friend into her scale to make weight—into the scale with
her father and herself. Amerigo and Charlotte would be in the other;
therefore it would take the three of them to keep that one straight.
And as this played, all duskily, in her mind it had received from
her father, with a sound of suddenness, a luminous contribution. “Ah,
rather! DO let’s have the Assinghams.”
“It would be to have them,” she had said, “as we used so much to have
them. For a good long stay, in the old way and on the old terms: ‘as
regular boarders’ Fanny used to call it. That is if they’ll come.”
“As regular boarders, on the old terms—that’s what I should like too.
But I guess they’ll come,” her companion had added in a tone into which
she had read meanings. The main meaning was that he felt he was going to
require them quite as much as she was. His recognition of the new terms
as different from the old, what was that, practically, but a confession
that something had happened, and a perception that, interested in the
situation she had helped to create, Mrs. Assingham would be, by so much
as this, concerned in its inevitable development? It amounted to an
intimation, off his guard, that he should be thankful for some one to
turn to. If she had wished covertly to sound him he had now, in short,
quite given himself away, and if she had, even at the start, needed
anything MORE to settle her, here assuredly was enough. He had hold of
his small grandchild as they retraced their steps, swinging the boy’s
hand and not bored, as he never was, by his always bristling, like a fat
little porcupine, with shrill interrogation-points—so that, secretly,
while they went, she had wondered again if the equilibrium mightn’t have
been more real, mightn’t above all have demanded less strange a
study, had it only been on the books that Charlotte should give him a
Principino of his own. She had repossessed herself now of his other arm,
only this time she was drawing him back, gently, helplessly back, to
what they had tried, for the hour, to get away from—just as he was
consciously drawing the child, and as high Miss Bogle on her left,
representing the duties of home, was complacently drawing HER. The
duties of home, when the house in Portland Place reappeared, showed,
even from a distance, as vividly there before them. Amerigo and
Charlotte had come in—that is Amerigo had, Charlotte, rather,
having come out—and the pair were perched together in the balcony, he
bare-headed, she divested of her jacket, her mantle, or whatever, but
crowned with a brilliant brave hat, responsive to the balmy day, which
Maggie immediately “spotted” as new, as insuperably original, as worn,
in characteristic generous harmony, for the first time; all, evidently,
to watch for the return of the absent, to be there to take them over
again as punctually as possible. They were gay, they were amused, in
the pleasant morning; they leaned across the rail and called down
their greeting, lighting up the front of the great black house with an
expression that quite broke the monotony, that might almost have shocked
the decency, of Portland Place. The group on the pavement stared up as
at the peopled battlements of a castle; even Miss Bogle, who carried
her head most aloft, gaped a little, through the interval of space, as
toward truly superior beings. There could scarce have been so much
of the open mouth since the dingy waits, on Christmas Eve, had so
lamentably chanted for pennies—the time when Amerigo, insatiable for
English customs, had come out, with a gasped “Santissima Vergine!” to
marvel at the depositaries of this tradition and purchase a reprieve.
Maggie’s individual gape was inevitably again for the thought of how the
pair would be at work.