“Something very strange has happened, and I think you ought to know it.”
Maggie spoke this indeed without extravagance, yet with the effect of
making her guest measure anew the force of her appeal. It was their
definite understanding: whatever Fanny knew Fanny’s faith would provide
for. And she knew, accordingly, at the end of five minutes, what the
extraordinary, in the late occurrence, had consisted of, and how it had
all come of Maggie’s achieved hour, under Mr. Crichton’s protection, at
the Museum. He had desired, Mr. Crichton, with characteristic kindness,
after the wonderful show, after offered luncheon at his incorporated
lodge hard by, to see her safely home; especially on his noting, in
attending her to the great steps, that she had dismissed her carriage;
which she had done, really, just for the harmless amusement of taking
her way alone. She had known she should find herself, as the consequence
of such an hour, in a sort of exalted state, under the influence of
which a walk through the London streets would be exactly what would suit
her best; an independent ramble, impressed, excited, contented, with
nothing to mind and nobody to talk to, and shop-windows in plenty
to look at if she liked: a low taste, of the essence, it was to be
supposed, of her nature, that she had of late, for so many reasons, been
unable to gratify. She had taken her leave, with her thanks—she knew
her way quite enough; it being also sufficiently the case that she had
even a shy hope of not going too straight. To wander a little wild was
what would truly amuse her; so that, keeping clear of Oxford Street and
cultivating an impression as of parts she didn’t know, she had ended
with what she had more or less had been fancying, an encounter with
three or four shops—an old bookseller’s, an old printmonger’s, a couple
of places with dim antiquities in the window—that were not as so many
of the other shops, those in Sloane Street, say; a hollow parade which
had long since ceased to beguile. There had remained with her moreover
an allusion of Charlotte’s, of some months before—seed dropped into
her imagination in the form of a casual speech about there being in
Bloomsbury such “funny little fascinating” places and even sometimes
such unexpected finds. There could perhaps have been no stronger mark
than this sense of well-nigh romantic opportunity—no livelier sign of
the impression made on her, and always so long retained, so watchfully
nursed, by any observation of Charlotte’s, however lightly thrown off.
And then she had felt, somehow, more at her ease than for months and
months before; she didn’t know why, but her time at the Museum, oddly,
had done it; it was as if she hadn’t come into so many noble and
beautiful associations, nor secured them also for her boy, secured them
even for her father, only to see them turn to vanity and doubt, turn
possibly to something still worse. “I believed in him again as much as
ever, and I felt how I believed in him,” she said with bright, fixed
eyes; “I felt it in the streets as I walked along, and it was as if that
helped me and lifted me up, my being off by myself there, not having,
for the moment, to wonder and watch; having, on the contrary, almost
nothing on my mind.”
It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen
to thinking of her father’s birthday, had given herself this as a reason
for trying what she could pick up for it. They would keep it at Fawns,
where they had kept it before—since it would be the twenty-first of the
month; and she mightn’t have another chance of making sure of something
to offer him. There was always the impossibility, of course, of finding
him anything, the least bit “good,” that he wouldn’t already, long ago,
in his rummagings, have seen himself—and only not to think a quarter
good enough; this, however, was an old story, and one could not have had
any fun with him but for his sweet theory that the individual gift, the
friendship’s offering, was, by a rigorous law of nature, a foredoomed
aberration, and that the more it was so the more it showed, and the more
one cherished it for showing, how friendly it had been. The infirmity
of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the
refinement of sympathy; the ugliest objects, in fact, as a general
thing, were the bravest, the tenderest mementos, and, as such, figured
in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home, but not worthy of
the temple—dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced, gods.
She herself, naturally, through the past years, had come to be much
represented in those receptacles; against the thick, locked panes of
which she still liked to flatten her nose, finding in its place, each
time, everything she had on successive anniversaries tried to believe he
might pretend, at her suggestion, to be put off with, or at least think
curious. She was now ready to try it again: they had always, with
his pleasure in her pretence and her pleasure in his, with the funny
betrayal of the sacrifice to domestic manners on either side, played
the game so happily. To this end, on her way home, she had loitered
everywhere; quite too deludedly among the old books and the old
prints, which had yielded nothing to her purpose, but with a strange
inconsequence in one of the other shops, that of a small antiquarian,
a queer little foreign man, who had shown her a number of things,
shown her finally something that, struck with it as rather a rarity and
thinking it would, compared to some of her ventures, quite superlatively
do, she had bought—bought really, when it came to that, for a price.
“It appears now it won’t do at all,” said Maggie, “something has
happened since that puts it quite out of the question. I had only my day
of satisfaction in it, but I feel, at the same time, as I keep it here
before me, that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
She had talked, from the first of her friend’s entrances coherently
enough, even with a small quaver that overstated her calm; but she held
her breath every few seconds, as if for deliberation and to prove she
didn’t pant—all of which marked for Fanny the depth of her commotion:
her reference to her thought about her father, about her chance to
pick up something that might divert him, her mention, in fine, of his
fortitude under presents, having meanwhile, naturally, it should be
said, much less an amplitude of insistence on the speaker’s lips than a
power to produce on the part of the listener herself the prompt
response and full comprehension of memory and sympathy, of old amused
observation. The picture was filled out by the latter’s fond fancy. But
Maggie was at any rate under arms; she knew what she was doing and
had already her plan—a plan for making, for allowing, as yet, “no
difference”; in accordance with which she would still dine out, and
not with red eyes, nor convulsed features, nor neglected items of
appearance, nor anything that would raise a question. Yet there was some
knowledge that, exactly to this support of her not breaking down, she
desired, she required, possession of; and, with the sinister rise
and fall of lightning unaccompanied by thunder, it played before Mrs.
Assingham’s eyes that she herself should have, at whatever risk or
whatever cost, to supply her with the stuff of her need. All our
friend’s instinct was to hold off from this till she should see what the
ground would bear; she would take no step nearer unless INTELLIGIBLY to
meet her, and, awkward though it might be to hover there only pale and
distorted, with mere imbecilities of vagueness, there was a quality of
bald help in the fact of not as yet guessing what such an ominous start
could lead to. She caught, however, after a second’s thought, at the
Princess’s allusion to her lost reassurance.
“You mean you were so at your ease on Monday—the night you dined with
us?”
“I was very happy then,” said Maggie.
“Yes—we thought you so gay and so brilliant.” Fanny felt it feeble, but
she went on. “We were so glad you were happy.”
Maggie stood a moment, at first only looking at her. “You thought me all
right, eh?”
“Surely, dearest; we thought you all right.”
“Well, I daresay it was natural; but in point of fact I never was more
wrong in my life. For, all the while, if you please, this was brewing.”
Mrs. Assingham indulged, as nearly as possible to luxury, her vagueness.
“‘This’—?”
“THAT!” replied the Princess, whose eyes, her companion now saw, had
turned to an object on the chimney-piece of the room, of which, among
so many precious objects—the Ververs, wherever they might be, always
revelled peculiarly in matchless old mantel ornaments—her visitor had
not taken heed.
“Do you mean the gilt cup?”
“I mean the gilt cup.”
The piece now recognised by Fanny as new to her own vision was a
capacious bowl, of old-looking, rather strikingly yellow gold, mounted,
by a short stem, on an ample foot, which held a central position above
the fire-place, where, to allow it the better to show, a clearance
had been made of other objects, notably of the Louis-Seize clock that
accompanied the candelabra. This latter trophy ticked at present on the
marble slab of a commode that exactly matched it in splendour and style.
Mrs. Assingham took it, the bowl, as a fine thing; but the question was
obviously not of its intrinsic value, and she kept off from it, admiring
it at a distance. “But what has that to do—?”
“It has everything. You’ll see.” With which again, however, for
the moment, Maggie attached to her strange wide eyes. “He knew her
before—before I had ever seen him.”
“‘He’ knew—?” But Fanny, while she cast about her for the links she
missed, could only echo it.
“Amerigo knew Charlotte—more than I ever dreamed.”
Fanny felt then it was stare for stare. “But surely you always knew they
had met.”
“I didn’t understand. I knew too little. Don’t you see what I mean?” the
Princess asked.
Mrs. Assingham wondered, during these instants, how much she even now
knew; it had taken a minute to perceive how gently she was speaking.
With that perception of its being no challenge of wrath, no heat of
the deceived soul, but only a free exposure of the completeness of past
ignorance, inviting derision even if it must, the elder woman felt,
first, a strange, barely credible relief: she drew in, as if it had been
the warm summer scent of a flower, the sweet certainty of not meeting,
any way she should turn, any consequence of judgment. She shouldn’t be
judged—save by herself; which was her own wretched business. The next
moment, however, at all events, she blushed, within, for her immediate
cowardice: she had thought of herself, thought of “getting off,” before
so much as thinking—that is of pitifully seeing—that she was in
presence of an appeal that was ALL an appeal, that utterly accepted its
necessity. “In a general way, dear child, yes. But not—a—in connexion
with what you’ve been telling me.”
“They were intimate, you see. Intimate,” said the Princess.
Fanny continued to face her, taking from her excited eyes this history,
so dim and faint for all her anxious emphasis, of the far-away other
time. “There’s always the question of what one considers—!”
“What one considers intimate? Well, I know what I consider intimate now.
Too intimate,” said Maggie, “to let me know anything about it.”
It was quiet—yes; but not too quiet for Fanny Assingham’s capacity to
wince. “Only compatible with letting ME, you mean?” She had asked it
after a pause, but turning again to the new ornament of the chimney
and wondering, even while she took relief from it, at this gap in her
experience. “But here are things, my dear, of which my ignorance is
perfect.”
“They went about together—they’re known to have done it. And I don’t
mean only before—I mean after.”
“After?” said Fanny Assingham.
“Before we were married—yes; but after we were engaged.”
“Ah, I’ve known nothing about that!” And she said it with a braver
assurance—clutching, with comfort, at something that was apparently new
to her.
“That bowl,” Maggie went on, “is, so strangely—too strangely, almost,
to believe at this time of day—the proof. They were together all the
while—up to the very eve of our marriage. Don’t you remember how just
before that she came back, so unexpectedly, from America?”
The question had for Mrs. Assingham—and whether all consciously
or not—the oddest pathos of simplicity. “Oh yes, dear, of course I
remember how she came back from America—and how she stayed with US, and
what view one had of it.”
Maggie’s eyes still, all the time, pressed and penetrated; so that,
during a moment, just here, she might have given the little flare, have
made the little pounce, of asking what then “one’s” view had been. To
the small flash of this eruption Fanny stood, for her minute, wittingly
exposed; but she saw it as quickly cease to threaten—quite saw the
Princess, even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their
strange and exalted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity
for planting the stab of reproach, the opportunity thus coming all of
itself. She saw her—or she believed she saw her—look at her chance
for straight denunciation, look at it and then pass it by; and she felt
herself, with this fact, hushed well-nigh to awe at the lucid higher
intention that no distress could confound and that no discovery—since
it was, however obscurely, a case of “discovery”—could make less
needful. These seconds were brief—they rapidly passed; but they
lasted long enough to renew our friend’s sense of her own extraordinary
undertaking, the function again imposed on her, the answerability again
drilled into her, by this intensity of intimation. She was reminded of
the terms on which she was let off—her quantity of release having made
its sufficient show in that recall of her relation to Charlotte’s
old reappearance; and deep within the whole impression glowed—ah, so
inspiringly when it came to that! her steady view, clear from the first,
of the beauty of her companion’s motive. It was like a fresh sacrifice
for a larger conquest “Only see me through now, do it in the face of
this and in spite of it, and I leave you a hand of which the freedom
isn’t to be said!” The aggravation of fear—or call it, apparently, of
knowledge—had jumped straight into its place as an aggravation above
all for her father; the effect of this being but to quicken to passion
her reasons for making his protectedness, or in other words the forms
of his ignorance, still the law of her attitude and the key to her
solution. She kept as tight hold of these reasons and these forms, in
her confirmed horror, as the rider of a plunging horse grasps his seat
with his knees; and she might absolutely have been putting it to her
guest that she believed she could stay on if they should only “meet”
nothing more. Though ignorant still of what she had definitely met Fanny
yearned, within, over her spirit; and so, no word about it said, passed,
through mere pitying eyes, a vow to walk ahead and, at crossroads, with
a lantern for the darkness and wavings away for unadvised traffic, look
out for alarms. There was accordingly no wait in Maggie’s reply. “They
spent together hours—spent at least a morning—the certainty of which
has come back to me now, but that I didn’t dream of it at the time. That
cup there has turned witness—by the most wonderful of chances. That’s
why, since it has been here, I’ve stood it out for my husband to see;
put it where it would meet him, almost immediately, if he should come
into the room. I’ve wanted it to meet him,” she went on, “and I’ve
wanted him to meet it, and to be myself present at the meeting. But that
hasn’t taken place as yet; often as he has lately been in the way of
coming to see me here—yes, in particular lately—he hasn’t showed
to-day.” It was with her managed quietness, more and more, that she
talked—an achieved coherence that helped her, evidently, to hear and
to watch herself; there was support, and thereby an awful harmony, but
which meant a further guidance, in the facts she could add together.
“It’s quite as if he had an instinct—something that has warned him off
or made him uneasy. He doesn’t quite know, naturally, what has happened,
but guesses, with his beautiful cleverness, that something has, and
isn’t in a hurry to be confronted with it. So, in his vague fear, he
keeps off.”
“But being meanwhile in the house—?”
“I’ve no idea—not having seen him to-day, by exception, since before
luncheon. He spoke to me then,” the Princess freely explained, “of a
ballot, of great importance, at a club—for somebody, some personal
friend, I think, who’s coming up and is supposed to be in danger. To
make an effort for him he thought he had better lunch there. You see the
efforts he can make”—for which Maggie found a smile that went to her
friend’s heart. “He’s in so many ways the kindest of men. But it was
hours ago.”
Mrs. Assingham thought. “The more danger then of his coming in and
finding me here. I don’t know, you see, what you now consider that
you’ve ascertained; nor anything of the connexion with it of that object
that you declare so damning.” Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition
and then quitted it, went back to it and again turned from it: it was
inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment
one had thus appraised it, vivid and definite in its domination of
the scene. Fanny could no more overlook it now than she could have
overlooked a lighted Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she
dipped into her mind for some floating reminiscence of it. At the same
time that this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she
even not a little shared the Prince’s mystic apprehension. The golden
bowl put on, under consideration, a sturdy, a conscious perversity; as
a “document,” somehow, it was ugly, though it might have a decorative
grace. “His finding me here in presence of it might be more flagrantly
disagreeable—for all of us—than you intend or than would necessarily
help us. And I must take time, truly, to understand what it means.”
“You’re safe, as far as that goes,” Maggie returned; “you may take it
from me that he won’t come in; and that I shall only find him below,
waiting for me, when I go down to the carriage.”
Fanny Assingham took it from her, took it and more. “We’re to sit
together at the Ambassador’s then—or at least you two are—with this
new complication thrust up before you, all unexplained; and to look
at each other with faces that pretend, for the ghastly hour, not to be
seeing it?”
Maggie looked at HER with a face that might have been the one she was
preparing. “‘Unexplained,’ my dear? Quite the contrary—explained:
fully, intensely, admirably explained, with nothing really to add. My
own love”—she kept it up—“I don’t want anything more. I’ve plenty to
go upon and to do with, as it is.”
Fanny Assingham stood there in her comparative darkness, with her links,
verily, still missing; but the most acceptable effect of this was,
singularly, as yet, a cold fear of getting nearer the fact. “But when
you come home—? I mean he’ll come up with you again. Won’t he see it
then?”
On which Maggie gave her, after an instant’s visible thought, the
strangest of slow headshakes. “I don’t know. Perhaps he’ll never see
it—if it only stands there waiting for him. He may never again,” said
the Princess, “come into this room.”
Fanny more deeply wondered, “Never again? Oh—!”
“Yes, it may be. How do I know? With THIS!” she quietly went on. She had
not looked again at the incriminating piece, but there was a marvel to
her friend in the way the little word representing it seemed to express
and include for her the whole of her situation. “Then you intend not to
speak to him—?”
Maggie waited. “To ‘speak’—?”
“Well, about your having it and about what you consider that it
represents.”
“Oh, I don’t know that I shall speak—if he doesn’t. But his keeping
away from me because of that—what will that be but to speak? He
can’t say or do more. It won’t be for me to speak,” Maggie added in
a different tone, one of the tones that had already so penetrated her
guest. “It will be for me to listen.”
Mrs. Assingham turned it over. “Then it all depends on that object that
you regard, for your reasons, as evidence?”
“I think I may say that _I_ depend on it. I can’t,” said Maggie, “treat
it as nothing now.”
Mrs. Assingham, at this, went closer to the cup on the chimney—quite
liking to feel that she did so, moreover, without going closer to her
companion’s vision. She looked at the precious thing—if precious it
was—found herself in fact eyeing it as if, by her dim solicitation, to
draw its secret from it rather than suffer the imposition of Maggie’s
knowledge. It was brave and rich and firm, with its bold deep hollow;
and, without this queer torment about it, would, thanks to her love of
plenty of yellow, figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession
really desirable. She didn’t touch it, but if after a minute she turned
away from it the reason was, rather oddly and suddenly, in her fear of
doing so. “Then it all depends on the bowl? I mean your future does? For
that’s what it comes to, I judge.”
“What it comes to,” Maggie presently returned, “is what that thing has
put me, so almost miraculously, in the way of learning: how far they
had originally gone together. If there was so much between them before,
there can’t—with all the other appearances—not be a great deal more
now.” And she went on and on; she steadily made her points. “If such
things were already then between them they make all the difference for
possible doubt of what may have been between them since. If there had
been nothing before there might be explanations. But it makes to-day too
much to explain. I mean to explain away,” she said.
Fanny Assingham was there to explain away—of this she was duly
conscious; for that at least had been true up to now. In the light,
however, of Maggie’s demonstration the quantity, even without her taking
as yet a more exact measure, might well seem larger than ever. Besides
which, with or without exactness, the effect of each successive minute
in the place was to put her more in presence of what Maggie herself saw.
Maggie herself saw the truth, and that was really, while they remained
there together, enough for Mrs. Assingham’s relation to it. There was
a force in the Princess’s mere manner about it that made the detail of
what she knew a matter of minor importance. Fanny had in fact something
like a momentary shame over her own need of asking for this detail.
“I don’t pretend to repudiate,” she said after a little, “my own
impressions of the different times I suppose you speak of; any more,”
she added, “than I can forget what difficulties and, as it constantly
seemed to me, what dangers, every course of action—whatever I should
decide upon—made for me. I tried, I tried hard, to act for the best.
And, you know,” she next pursued, while, at the sound of her own
statement, a slow courage and even a faint warmth of conviction came
back to her—“and, you know, I believe it’s what I shall turn out to
have done.”
This produced a minute during which their interchange, though quickened
and deepened, was that of silence only, and the long, charged look; all
of which found virtual consecration when Maggie at last spoke. “I’m sure
you tried to act for the best.”
It kept Fanny Assingham again a minute in silence. “I never thought,
dearest, you weren’t an angel.”
Not, however, that this alone was much help! “It was up to the very eve,
you see,” the Princess went on—“up to within two or three days of our
marriage. That, THAT, you know—!” And she broke down for strangely
smiling.
“Yes, as I say, it was while she was with me. But I didn’t know it. That
is,” said Fanny Assingham, “I didn’t know of anything in particular.” It
sounded weak—that she felt; but she had really her point to make. “What
I mean is that I don’t know, for knowledge, now, anything I didn’t then.
That’s how I am.” She still, however, floundered. “I mean it’s how I
WAS.”
“But don’t they, how you were and how you are,” Maggie asked, “come
practically to the same thing?” The elder woman’s words had struck
her own ear as in the tone, now mistimed, of their recent, but all too
factitious understanding, arrived at in hours when, as there was nothing
susceptible of proof, there was nothing definitely to disprove. The
situation had changed by—well, by whatever there was, by the outbreak
of the definite; and this could keep Maggie at least firm. She was firm
enough as she pursued. “It was ON the whole thing that Amerigo married
me.” With which her eyes had their turn again at her damnatory piece.
“And it was on that—it was on that!” But they came back to her visitor.
“And it was on it all that father married HER.”
Her visitor took it as might be. “They both married—ah, that you must
believe!—with the highest intentions.”
“Father did certainly!” And then, at the renewal of this consciousness,
it all rolled over her. “Ah, to thrust such things on us, to do them
here between us and with us, day after day, and in return, in return—!
To do it to HIM—to him, to him!”
Fanny hesitated. “You mean it’s for him you most suffer?” And then
as the Princess, after a look, but turned away, moving about the
room—which made the question somehow seem a blunder—“I ask,” she
continued, “because I think everything, everything we now speak of, may
be for him, really may be MADE for him, quite as if it hadn’t been.”
But Maggie had, the next moment faced about as if without hearing her.
“Father did it for ME—did it all and only for me.”
Mrs. Assingham, with a certain promptness, threw up her head; but she
faltered again before she spoke. “Well—!”
It was only an intended word, but Maggie showed after an instant that
it had reached her. “Do you mean that that’s the reason, that that’s A
reason—?”
Fanny at first, however, feeling the response in this, didn’t say all
she meant; she said for the moment something else instead. “He did it
for you—largely at least for you. And it was for you that I did, in
my smaller, interested way—well, what I could do. For I could do
something,” she continued; “I thought I saw your interest as he himself
saw it. And I thought I saw Charlotte’s. I believed in her.”
“And _I_ believed in her,” said Maggie.
Mrs. Assingham waited again; but she presently pushed on. “She believed
then in herself.”
“Ah?” Maggie murmured.
Something exquisite, faintly eager, in the prompt simplicity of it,
supported her friend further. “And the Prince believed. His belief was
real. Just as he believed in himself.”
Maggie spent a minute in taking it from her. “He believed in himself?”
“Just as I too believed in him. For I absolutely did, Maggie.” To
which Fanny then added: “And I believe in him yet. I mean,” she
subjoined—“well, I mean I DO.”
Maggie again took it from her; after which she was again, restlessly,
set afloat. Then when this had come to an end: “And do you believe in
Charlotte yet?”
Mrs. Assingham had a demur that she felt she could now afford. “We’ll
talk of Charlotte some other day. They both, at any rate, thought
themselves safe at the time.”
“Then why did they keep from me everything I might have known?”
Her friend bent upon her the mildest eyes. “Why did I myself keep it
from you?”
“Oh, you weren’t, for honour, obliged.”
“Dearest Maggie,” the poor woman broke out on this, “you ARE divine!”
“They pretended to love me,” the Princess went on. “And they pretended
to love HIM.”
“And pray what was there that I didn’t pretend?”
“Not, at any rate, to care for me as you cared for Amerigo and for
Charlotte. They were much more interesting—it was perfectly natural.
How couldn’t you like Amerigo?” Maggie continued.
Mrs. Assingham gave it up. “How couldn’t I, how couldn’t I?” Then, with
a fine freedom, she went all her way. “How CAN’T I, how can’t I?”
It fixed afresh Maggie’s wide eyes on her. “I see—I see. Well, it’s
beautiful for you to be able to. And of course,” she added, “you wanted
to help Charlotte.”
“Yes”—Fanny considered it—“I wanted to help Charlotte. But I wanted
also, you see, to help you—by not digging up a past that I believed,
with so much on top of it, solidly buried. I wanted, as I still want,”
she richly declared, “to help every one.”
It set Maggie once more in movement—movement which, however, spent
itself again with a quick emphasis. “Then it’s a good deal my fault—if
everything really began so well?”
Fanny Assingham met it as she could. “You’ve been only too perfect.
You’ve thought only too much.”
But the Princess had already caught at the words. “Yes—I’ve thought
only too much!” Yet she appeared to continue, for the minute, full of
that fault. She had it in fact, by this prompted thought, all before
her. “Of him, dear man, of HIM—!”
Her friend, able to take in thus directly her vision of her father,
watched her with a new suspense. THAT way might safety lie—it was like
a wider chink of light. “He believed—with a beauty!—in Charlotte.”
“Yes, and it was I who had made him believe. I didn’t mean to, at the
time, so much; for I had no idea then of what was coming. But I did it,
I did it!” the Princess declared.
“With a beauty—ah, with a beauty, you too!” Mrs. Assingham insisted.
Maggie, however, was seeing for herself—it was another matter, “The
thing was that he made her think it would be so possible.”
Fanny again hesitated. “The Prince made her think—?”
Maggie stared—she had meant her father. But her vision seemed to
spread. “They both made her think. She wouldn’t have thought without
them.”
“Yet Amerigo’s good faith,” Mrs. Assingham insisted, “was perfect. And
there was nothing, all the more,” she added, “against your father’s.”
The remark, however, kept Maggie for a moment still. “Nothing perhaps
but his knowing that she knew.”
“‘Knew’?”
“That he was doing it, so much, for me. To what extent,” she suddenly
asked of her friend, “do you think he was aware that she knew?”
“Ah, who can say what passes between people in such a relation? The only
thing one can be sure of is that he was generous.” And Mrs. Assingham
conclusively smiled. “He doubtless knew as much as was right for
himself.”
“As much, that is, as was right for her.”
“Yes then—as was right for her. The point is,” Fanny declared, “that,
whatever his knowledge, it made, all the way it went, for his good
faith.”
Maggie continued to gaze, and her friend now fairly waited on her
successive movements. “Isn’t the point, very considerably, that his good
faith must have been his faith in her taking almost as much interest in
me as he himself took?”
Fanny Assingham thought. “He recognised, he adopted, your long
friendship. But he founded on it no selfishness.”
“No,” said Maggie with still deeper consideration: “he counted her
selfishness out almost as he counted his own.”
“So you may say.”
“Very well,” Maggie went on; “if he had none of his own, he invited her,
may have expected her, on her side, to have as little. And she may only
since have found that out.”
Mrs. Assingham looked blank. “Since—?”
“And he may have become aware,” Maggie pursued, “that she has found
it out. That she has taken the measure, since their marriage,” she
explained, “of how much he had asked of her—more, say, than she had
understood at the time. He may have made out at last how such a demand
was, in the long run, to affect her.”
“He may have done many things,” Mrs. Assingham responded; “but there’s
one thing he certainly won’t have done. He’ll never have shown that he
expected of her a quarter as much as she must have understood he was to
give.”
“I’ve often wondered,” Maggie mused, “what Charlotte really understood.
But it’s one of the things she has never told me.”
“Then as it’s one of the things she has never told me either, we shall
probably never know it; and we may regard it as none of our business.
There are many things,” said Mrs. Assingham, “that we shall never know.”
Maggie took it in with a long reflection. “Never.”
“But there are others,” her friend went on, “that stare us in the face
and that—under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour—may now be
enough for us. Your father has been extraordinary.”
It had been as if Maggie were feeling her way; but she rallied to this
with a rush. “Extraordinary.”
“Magnificent,” said Fanny Assingham.
Her companion held tight to it. “Magnificent.”
“Then he’ll do for himself whatever there may be to do. What he
undertook for you he’ll do to the end. He didn’t undertake it to break
down; in what—quiet, patient, exquisite as he is—did he ever break
down? He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed, and
he won’t have done it on this occasion.”
“Ah, this occasion!”—and Maggie’s wail showed her, of a sudden, thrown
back on it. “Am I in the least sure that, with everything, he even knows
what it is? And yet am I in the least sure he doesn’t?”
“If he doesn’t then, so much the better. Leave him alone.”
“Do you mean give him up?”
“Leave HER,” Fanny Assingham went on. “Leave her TO him.”
Maggie looked at her darkly. “Do you mean leave him to HER? After this?”
“After everything. Aren’t they, for that matter, intimately together
now?”
“‘Intimately’—? How do I know?”
But Fanny kept it up. “Aren’t you and your husband—in spite of
everything?”
Maggie’s eyes still further, if possible, dilated. “It remains to be
seen!”
“If you’re not then, where’s your faith?”
“In my husband—?”
Mrs. Assingham but for an instant hesitated. “In your father. It all
comes back to that. Rest on it.”
“On his ignorance?”
Fanny met it again. “On whatever he may offer you. TAKE that.”
“Take it—?” Maggie stared.
Mrs. Assingham held up her head. “And be grateful.” On which, for a
minute, she let the Princess face her. “Do you see?”
“I see,” said Maggie at last.
“Then there you are.” But Maggie had turned away, moving to the window,
as if still to keep something in her face from sight. She stood there
with her eyes on the street while Mrs. Assingham’s reverted to that
complicating object on the chimney as to which her condition, so
oddly even to herself, was that both of recurrent wonder and recurrent
protest. She went over it, looked at it afresh and yielded now to her
impulse to feel it in her hands. She laid them on it, lifting it up, and
was surprised, thus, with the weight of it—she had seldom handled so
much massive gold. That effect itself somehow prompted her to further
freedom and presently to saying: “I don’t believe in this, you know.”
It brought Maggie round to her. “Don’t believe in it? You will when I
tell you.”
“Ah, tell me nothing! I won’t have it,” said Mrs. Assingham. She kept
the cup in her hand, held it there in a manner that gave Maggie’s
attention to her, she saw the next moment, a quality of excited
suspense. This suggested to her, oddly, that she had, with the liberty
she was taking, an air of intention, and the impression betrayed by
her companion’s eyes grew more distinct in a word of warning. “It’s of
value, but its value’s impaired, I’ve learned, by a crack.”
“A crack?—in the gold—?”
“It isn’t gold.” With which, somewhat strangely, Maggie smiled.
“That’s the point.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s glass—and cracked, under the gilt, as I say, at that.”
“Glass?—of this weight?”
“Well,” said Maggie, “it’s crystal—and was once, I suppose, precious.
But what,” she then asked, “do you mean to do with it?”
She had come away from her window, one of the three by which the wide
room, enjoying an advantageous “back,” commanded the western sky and
caught a glimpse of the evening flush; while Mrs. Assingham, possessed
of the bowl, and possessed too of this indication of a flaw, approached
another for the benefit of the slowly-fading light. Here, thumbing the
singular piece, weighing it, turning it over, and growing suddenly more
conscious, above all, of an irresistible impulse, she presently spoke
again. “A crack? Then your whole idea has a crack.”
Maggie, by this time at some distance from her, waited a moment. “If you
mean by my idea the knowledge that has come to me THAT—”
But Fanny, with decision, had already taken her up. “There’s only one
knowledge that concerns us—one fact with which we can have anything to
do.”
“Which one, then?”
“The fact that your husband has never, never, never—!” But the very
gravity of this statement, while she raised her eyes to her friend
across the room, made her for an instant hang fire.
“Well, never what?”
“Never been half so interested in you as now. But don’t you, my dear,
really feel it?”
Maggie considered. “Oh, I think what I’ve told you helps me to feel it.
His having to-day given up even his forms; his keeping away from me; his
not having come.” And she shook her head as against all easy glosses.
“It is because of that, you know.”
“Well then, if it’s because of this—!” And Fanny Assingham, who had
been casting about her and whose inspiration decidedly had come, raised
the cup in her two hands, raised it positively above her head, and from
under it, solemnly, smiled at the Princess as a signal of intention.
So for an instant, full of her thought and of her act, she held the
precious vessel, and then, with due note taken of the margin of the
polished floor, bare, fine and hard in the embrasure of her window, she
dashed it boldly to the ground, where she had the thrill of seeing it,
with the violence of the crash, lie shattered. She had flushed with the
force of her effort, as Maggie had flushed with wonder at the sight, and
this high reflection in their faces was all that passed between them for
a minute more. After which, “Whatever you meant by it—and I don’t want
to know NOW—has ceased to exist,” Mrs. Assingham said.
“And what in the world, my dear, did you mean by it?”—that sound, as at
the touch of a spring, rang out as the first effect of Fanny’s speech.
It broke upon the two women’s absorption with a sharpness almost equal
to the smash of the crystal, for the door of the room had been opened
by the Prince without their taking heed. He had apparently had time,
moreover, to catch the conclusion of Fanny’s act; his eyes attached
themselves, through the large space allowing just there, as happened,
a free view, to the shining fragments at this lady’s feet. His question
had been addressed to his wife, but he moved his eyes immediately
afterwards to those of her visitor, whose own then held them in a
manner of which neither party had been capable, doubtless, for mute
penetration, since the hour spent by him in Cadogan Place on the eve of
his marriage and the afternoon of Charlotte’s reappearance. Something
now again became possible for these communicants, under the intensity
of their pressure, something that took up that tale and that might
have been a redemption of pledges then exchanged. This rapid play of
suppressed appeal and disguised response lasted indeed long enough for
more results than one—long enough for Mrs. Assingham to measure the
feat of quick self-recovery, possibly therefore of recognition still
more immediate, accompanying Amerigo’s vision and estimate of the
evidence with which she had been—so admirably, she felt as she looked
at him—inspired to deal. She looked at him and looked at him—there
were so many things she wanted, on the spot, to say. But Maggie was
looking too—and was moreover looking at them both; so that these
things, for the elder woman, quickly enough reduced themselves to one.
She met his question—not too late, since, in their silence, it had
remained in the air. Gathering herself to go, leaving the golden bowl
split into three pieces on the ground, she simply referred him to his
wife. She should see them later, they would all meet soon again; and
meanwhile, as to what Maggie had meant—she said, in her turn, from the
door—why, Maggie herself was doubtless by this time ready to tell him.