The understanding appeared to have come to be that the Colonel and his
wife were to present themselves toward the middle of July for the “good
long visit” at Fawns on which Maggie had obtained from her father that
he should genially insist; as well as that the couple from Eaton Square
should welcome there earlier in the month, and less than a week after
their own arrival, the advent of the couple from Portland Place. “Oh,
we shall give you time to breathe!” Fanny remarked, in reference to the
general prospect, with a gaiety that announced itself as heedless of
criticism, to each member of the party in turn; sustaining and bracing
herself by her emphasis, pushed even to an amiable cynicism, of the
confident view of these punctualities of the Assinghams. The ground she
could best occupy, to her sense, was that of her being moved, as in this
connexion she had always been moved, by the admitted grossness of her
avidity, the way the hospitality of the Ververs met her convenience and
ministered to her ease, destitute as the Colonel had kept her, from the
first, of any rustic retreat, any leafy bower of her own, any fixed base
for the stale season now at hand. She had explained at home, she had
repeatedly reexplained, the terms of her dilemma, the real difficulty of
her, or—as she now put it—of their position. When the pair could
do nothing else, in Cadogan Place, they could still talk of marvellous
little Maggie, and of the charm, the sinister charm, of their having
to hold their breath to watch her; a topic the momentous midnight
discussion at which we have been present was so far from having
exhausted. It came up, irrepressibly, at all private hours; they had
planted it there between them, and it grew, from day to day, in a manner
to make their sense of responsibility almost yield to their sense
of fascination. Mrs. Assingham declared at such moments that in the
interest of this admirable young thing—to whom, she also declared, she
had quite “come over”—she was ready to pass with all the world else,
even with the Prince himself, the object, inconsequently, as well, of
her continued, her explicitly shameless appreciation, for a vulgar,
indelicate, pestilential woman, showing her true character in an
abandoned old age. The Colonel’s confessed attention had been enlisted,
we have seen, as never yet, under pressure from his wife, by any
guaranteed imbroglio; but this, she could assure him she perfectly knew,
was not a bit because he was sorry for her, or touched by what she had
let herself in for, but because, when once they had been opened,
he couldn’t keep his eyes from resting complacently, resting almost
intelligently, on the Princess. If he was in love with HER now, however,
so much the better; it would help them both not to wince at what they
would have to do for her. Mrs. Assingham had come back to that, whenever
he groaned or grunted; she had at no beguiled moment—since Maggie’s
little march WAS positively beguiling—let him lose sight of the grim
necessity awaiting them. “We shall have, as I’ve again and again told
you, to lie for her—to lie till we’re black in the face.”
“To lie ‘for’ her?” The Colonel often, at these hours, as from a vague
vision of old chivalry in a new form, wandered into apparent lapses from
lucidity.
“To lie TO her, up and down, and in and out—it comes to the same thing.
It will consist just as much of lying to the others too: to the Prince
about one’s belief in HIM; to Charlotte about one’s belief in HER; to
Mr. Verver, dear sweet man, about one’s belief in everyone. So we’ve
work cut out—with the biggest lie, on top of all, being that we LIKE to
be there for such a purpose. We hate it unspeakably—I’m more ready
to be a coward before it, to let the whole thing, to let everyone,
selfishly and pusillanimously slide, than before any social duty, any
felt human call, that has ever forced me to be decent. I speak at least
for myself. For you,” she had added, “as I’ve given you so perfect an
opportunity to fall in love with Maggie, you’ll doubtless find your
account in being so much nearer to her.”
“And what do you make,” the Colonel could, at this, always imperturbably
enough ask, “of the account you yourself will find in being so much
nearer to the Prince; of your confirmed, if not exasperated, infatuation
with whom—to say nothing of my weak good-nature about it—you give such
a pretty picture?”
To the picture in question she had been always, in fact, able
contemplatively to return. “The difficulty of my enjoyment of that is,
don’t you see? that I’m making, in my loyalty to Maggie, a sad hash of
his affection for me.”
“You find means to call it then, this whitewashing of his crime, being
‘loyal’ to Maggie?”
“Oh, about that particular crime there is always much to say. It is
always more interesting to us than any other crime; it has at least
that for it. But of course I call everything I have in mind at all being
loyal to Maggie. Being loyal to her is, more than anything else, helping
her with her father—which is what she most wants and needs.”
The Colonel had had it before, but he could apparently never have too
much of it. “Helping her ‘with’ him—?”
“Helping her against him then. Against what we’ve already so fully
talked of—its having to be recognised between them that he doubts.
That’s where my part is so plain—to see her through, to see her through
to the end.” Exaltation, for the moment, always lighted Mrs. Assingham’s
reference to this plainness; yet she at the same time seldom failed, the
next instant, to qualify her view of it. “When I talk of my obligation
as clear I mean that it’s absolute; for just HOW, from day to day and
through thick and thin, to keep the thing up is, I grant you, another
matter. There’s one way, luckily, nevertheless, in which I’m strong. I
can perfectly count on her.”
The Colonel seldom failed here, as from the insidious growth of an
excitement, to wonder, to encourage. “Not to see you’re lying?”
“To stick to me fast, whatever she sees. If I stick to her—that is
to my own poor struggling way, under providence, of watching over them
ALL—she’ll stand by me to the death. She won’t give me away. For, you
know, she easily can.”
This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their road; but Bob
Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. “Easily?”
“She can utterly dishonour me with her father. She can let him know that
I was aware, at the time of his marriage—as I had been aware at the
time of her own—of the relations that had pre-existed between his wife
and her husband.”
“And how can she do so if, up to this minute, by your own statement, she
is herself in ignorance of your knowledge?”
It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a
manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very
much as if she was invited by it to say that about this, exactly, she
proposed to do her best lying. But she said, and with full lucidity,
something quite other: it could give itself a little the air, still, of
a triumph over his coarseness. “By acting, immediately with the blind
resentment with which, in her place, ninety-nine women out of a hundred
would act; and by so making Mr. Verver, in turn, act with the same
natural passion, the passion of ninety-nine men out of a hundred.
They’ve only to agree about me,” the poor lady said; “they’ve only to
feel at one over it, feel bitterly practised upon, cheated and injured;
they’ve only to denounce me to each other as false and infamous, for me
to be quite irretrievably dished. Of course it’s I who have been, and
who continue to be, cheated—cheated by the Prince and Charlotte; but
they’re not obliged to give me the benefit of that, or to give either
of us the benefit of anything. They’ll be within their rights to lump us
all together as a false, cruel, conspiring crew, and, if they can find
the right facts to support them, get rid of us root and branch.”
This, on each occasion, put the matter so at the worst that repetition
even scarce controlled the hot flush with which she was compelled to
see the parts of the whole history, all its ugly consistency and its
temporary gloss, hang together. She enjoyed, invariably, the sense of
making her danger present, of making it real, to her husband, and of his
almost turning pale, when their eyes met, at this possibility of their
compromised state and their shared discredit. The beauty was that, as
under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he
sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond stupid uneasy man.
“Conspiring—so far as YOU were concerned—to what end?”
“Why, to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife—at Maggie’s
expense. And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr.
Verver’s.”
“Of rendering friendly services, yes—which have produced, as it
turns out, complications. But from the moment you didn’t do it FOR the
complications, why shouldn’t you have rendered them?”
It was extraordinary for her, always, in this connexion, how, with time
given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the
presence of her clear-cut image of the “worst,” speak for herself.
Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by
the way. “Oh, isn’t what I may have meddled ‘for’—so far as it can
be proved I did meddle—open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr.
Verver’s and Maggie’s? Mayn’t they see my motive, in the light of that
appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others
than to the victimised father and daughter?” She positively liked to
keep it up. “Mayn’t they see my motive as the determination to serve
the Prince, in any case, and at any price, first; to ‘place’ him
comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money? Mayn’t
it have all the air for them of a really equivocal, sinister bargain
between us—something quite unholy and louche?”
It produced in the poor Colonel, infallibly, the echo. “‘Louche,’
love—?”
“Why, haven’t you said as much yourself?—haven’t you put your finger on
that awful possibility?”
She had a way now, with his felicities, that made him enjoy being
reminded of them. “In speaking of your having always had such a
‘mash’—?”
“Such a mash, precisely, for the man I was to help to put so splendidly
at his ease. A motherly mash an impartial look at it would show it
only as likely to have been—but we’re not talking, of course, about
impartial looks. We’re talking of good innocent people deeply worked
upon by a horrid discovery, and going much further, in their view of the
lurid, as such people almost always do, than those who have been wider
awake, all round, from the first. What I was to have got from my
friend, in such a view, in exchange for what I had been able to do for
him—well, that would have been an equivalent, of a kind best known to
myself, for me shrewdly to consider.” And she easily lost herself, each
time, in the anxious satisfaction of filling out the picture. “It would
have been seen, it would have been heard of, before, the case of the
woman a man doesn’t want, or of whom he’s tired, or for whom he has
no use but SUCH uses, and who is capable, in her infatuation, in her
passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than lose
sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all.
Cela s’est vu, my dear; and stranger things still—as I needn’t tell
YOU! Very good then,” she wound up; “there is a perfectly possible
conception of the behaviour of your sweet wife; since, as I say, there’s
no imagination so lively, once it’s started, as that of really agitated
lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are
blases, are brought up, from the first, to prowling and mauling. It does
give us, you’ll admit, something to think about. My relief is luckily,
however, in what I finally do think.”
He was well enough aware, by this time, of what she finally did think;
but he was not without a sense, again, also for his amusement by the
way. It would have made him, for a spectator of these passages between
the pair, resemble not a little the artless child who hears his
favourite story told for the twentieth time and enjoys it exactly
because he knows what is next to happen. “What of course will pull them
up, if they turn out to have less imagination than you assume, is the
profit you can have found in furthering Mrs. Verver’s marriage. You
weren’t at least in love with Charlotte.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Assingham, at this, always brought out, “my hand in that is
easily accounted for by my desire to be agreeable to HIM.”
“To Mr. Verver?”
“To the Prince—by preventing her in that way from taking, as he was in
danger of seeing her do, some husband with whom he wouldn’t be able to
open, to keep open, so large an account as with his father-in-law. I’ve
brought her near him, kept her within his reach, as she could never have
remained either as a single woman or as the wife of a different man.”
“Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress?”
“Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress.” She brought
it out grandly—it had always so, for her own ear as well as, visibly,
for her husband’s, its effect. “The facilities in the case, thanks to
the particular conditions, being so quite ideal.”
“Down even to the facility of your minding everything so little—from
your own point of view—as to have supplied him with the enjoyment of
TWO beautiful women.”
“Down even to THAT—to the monstrosity of my folly. But not,” Mrs.
Assingham added, “‘two’ of anything. One beautiful woman—and one
beautiful fortune. That’s what a creature of pure virtue exposes
herself to when she suffers her pure virtue, suffers her sympathy, her
disinterestedness, her exquisite sense for the lives of others, to carry
her too far. Voila.”
“I see. It’s the way the Ververs have you.”
“It’s the way the Ververs ‘have’ me. It’s in other words the way they
would be able to make such a show to each other of having me—if Maggie
weren’t so divine.”
“She lets you off?” He never failed to insist on all this to the very
end; which was how he had become so versed in what she finally thought.
“She lets me off. So that now, horrified and contrite at what I’ve done,
I may work to help her out. And Mr. Verver,” she was fond of adding,
“lets me off too.”
“Then you do believe he knows?”
It determined in her always, there, with a significant pause, a deep
immersion in her thought. “I believe he would let me off if he did
know—so that I might work to help HIM out. Or rather, really,” she went
on, “that I might work to help Maggie. That would be his motive, that
would be his condition, in forgiving me; just as hers, for me, in fact,
her motive and her condition, are my acting to spare her father. But
it’s with Maggie only that I’m directly concerned; nothing, ever—not a
breath, not a look, I’ll guarantee—shall I have, whatever happens, from
Mr. Verver himself. So it is, therefore, that I shall probably, by the
closest possible shave, escape the penalty of my crimes.”
“You mean being held responsible.”
“I mean being held responsible. My advantage will be that Maggie’s such
a trump.”
“Such a trump that, as you say, she’ll stick to you.”
“Stick to me, on our understanding—stick to me. For our understanding’s
signed and sealed.” And to brood over it again was ever, for Mrs.
Assingham, to break out again with exaltation. “It’s a grand, high
compact. She has solemnly promised.”
“But in words—?”
“Oh yes, in words enough—since it’s a matter of words. To keep up HER
lie so long as I keep up mine.”
“And what do you call ‘her’ lie?”
“Why, the pretence that she believes me. Believes they’re innocent.”
“She positively believes then they’re guilty? She has arrived at that,
she’s really content with it, in the absence of proof?” It was here,
each time, that Fanny Assingham most faltered; but always at last to
get the matter, for her own sense, and with a long sigh, sufficiently
straight. “It isn’t a question of belief or of proof, absent or
present; it’s inevitably, with her, a question of natural perception,
of insurmountable feeling. She irresistibly knows that there’s something
between them. But she hasn’t ‘arrived’ at it, as you say, at all; that’s
exactly what she hasn’t done, what she so steadily and intensely refuses
to do. She stands off and off, so as not to arrive; she keeps out to sea
and away from the rocks, and what she most wants of me is to keep at
a safe distance with her—as I, for my own skin, only ask not to come
nearer.” After which, invariably, she let him have it all. “So far
from wanting proof—which she must get, in a manner, by my siding with
her—she wants DISproof, as against herself, and has appealed to me, so
extraordinarily, to side against her. It’s really magnificent, when you
come to think of it, the spirit of her appeal. If I’ll but cover them
up brazenly enough, the others, so as to show, round and about them, as
happy as a bird, she on her side will do what she can. If I’ll keep them
quiet, in a word, it will enable her to gain time—time as against any
idea of her father’s—and so, somehow, come out. If I’ll take care
of Charlotte, in particular, she’ll take care of the Prince; and it’s
beautiful and wonderful, really pathetic and exquisite, to see what she
feels that time may do for her.”
“Ah, but what does she call, poor little thing, ‘time’?”
“Well, this summer at Fawns, to begin with. She can live as yet, of
course, but from hand to mouth; but she has worked it out for herself,
I think, that the very danger of Fawns, superficially looked at, may
practically amount to a greater protection. THERE the lovers—if they
ARE lovers!—will have to mind. They’ll feel it for themselves, unless
things are too utterly far gone with them.”
“And things are NOT too utterly far gone with them?”
She had inevitably, poor woman, her hesitation for this, but she put
down her answer as, for the purchase of some absolutely indispensable
article, she would have put down her last shilling. “No.”
It made him always grin at her. “Is THAT a lie?”
“Do you think you’re worth lying to? If it weren’t the truth, for me,”
she added, “I wouldn’t have accepted for Fawns. I CAN, I believe, keep
the wretches quiet.”
“But how—at the worst?”
“Oh, ‘the worst’—don’t talk about the worst! I can keep them quiet at
the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work, from
week to week, of itself. You’ll see.”
He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide—! “Yet if it
doesn’t work?”
“Ah, that’s talking about the worst!”
Well, it might be; but what were they doing, from morning to night, at
this crisis, but talk? “Who’ll keep the others?”
“The others—?”
“Who’ll keep THEM quiet? If your couple have had a life together, they
can’t have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of
persons, however few, who must have some knowledge, some idea about
them. They’ve had to meet, secretly, protectedly, they’ve had to
arrange; for if they haven’t met, and haven’t arranged, and haven’t
thereby, in some quarter or other, had to give themselves away, why are
we piling it up so? Therefore if there’s evidence, up and down London—”
“There must be people in possession of it? Ah, it isn’t all,” she always
remembered, “up and down London. Some of it must connect them—I mean,”
she musingly added, “it naturally WOULD—with other places; with who
knows what strange adventures, opportunities, dissimulations? But
whatever there may have been, it will also all have been buried on the
spot. Oh, they’ve known HOW—too beautifully! But nothing, all the same,
is likely to find its way to Maggie of itself.”
“Because every one who may have anything to tell, you hold, will have
been so squared?” And then inveterately, before she could say—he
enjoyed so much coming to this: “What will have squared Lady
Castledean?”
“The consciousness”—she had never lost her promptness—“of having no
stones to throw at any one else’s windows. She has enough to do to guard
her own glass. That was what she was doing,” Fanny said, “that last
morning at Matcham when all of us went off and she kept the Prince
and Charlotte over. She helped them simply that she might herself be
helped—if it wasn’t perhaps, rather, with her ridiculous Mr. Blint,
that HE might be. They put in together, therefore, of course, that day;
they got it clear—and quite under her eyes; inasmuch as they didn’t
become traceable again, as we know, till late in the evening.” On this
historic circumstance Mrs. Assingham was always ready afresh to brood;
but she was no less ready, after her brooding, devoutly to add “Only we
know nothing whatever else—for which all our stars be thanked!”
The Colonel’s gratitude was apt to be less marked. “What did they do for
themselves, all the same, from the moment they got that free hand to the
moment (long after dinner-time, haven’t you told me?) of their turning
up at their respective homes?”
“Well, it’s none of your business!”
“I don’t speak of it as mine, but it’s only too much theirs. People are
always traceable, in England, when tracings are required. Something,
sooner or later, happens; somebody, sooner or later, breaks the holy
calm. Murder will out.”
“Murder will—but this isn’t murder. Quite the contrary perhaps! I
verily believe,” she had her moments of adding, “that, for the amusement
of the row, you would prefer an explosion.”
This, however, was a remark he seldom noticed; he wound up, for the most
part, after a long, contemplative smoke, with a transition from which no
exposed futility in it had succeeded in weaning him. “What I can’t for
my life make out is your idea of the old boy.”
“Charlotte’s too inconceivably funny husband? I HAVE no idea.”
“I beg your pardon—you’ve just shown it. You never speak of him but as
too inconceivably funny.”
“Well, he is,” she always confessed. “That is he may be, for all I know,
too inconceivably great. But that’s not an idea. It represents only
my weak necessity of feeling that he’s beyond me—which isn’t an idea
either. You see he MAY be stupid too.”
“Precisely—there you are.”
“Yet on the other hand,” she always went on, “he MAY be sublime:
sublimer even than Maggie herself. He may in fact have already been. But
we shall never know.” With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of
soreness for the single exemption she didn’t yearningly welcome. “THAT I
can see.”
“Oh, I say—!” It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of
privation.
“I’m not sure, even, that Charlotte will.”
“Oh, my dear, what Charlotte doesn’t know—!”
But she brooded and brooded. “I’m not sure even that the Prince will.”
It seemed privation, in short, for them all. “They’ll be mystified,
confounded, tormented. But they won’t know—and all their possible
putting their heads together won’t make them. That,” said Fanny
Assingham, “will be their punishment.” And she ended, ever, when she
had come so far, at the same pitch. “It will probably also—if I get off
with so little—be mine.”
“And what,” her husband liked to ask, “will be mine?”
“Nothing—you’re not worthy of any. One’s punishment is in what one
feels, and what will make ours effective is that we SHALL feel.” She was
splendid with her “ours”; she flared up with this prophecy. “It will be
Maggie herself who will mete it out.”
“Maggie—?”
“SHE’LL know—about her father; everything. Everything,” she repeated.
On the vision of which, each time, Mrs. Assingham, as with the
presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it. “But she’ll never
tell us.”