They had been alone that evening—alone as a party of six, and four of
them, after dinner, under suggestion not to be resisted, sat down
to “bridge” in the smoking-room. They had passed together to that
apartment, on rising from table, Charlotte and Mrs. Assingham alike
indulgent, always, to tobacco, and in fact practising an emulation
which, as Fanny said, would, for herself, had the Colonel not issued
an interdict based on the fear of her stealing his cigars, have stopped
only at the short pipe. Here cards had with inevitable promptness
asserted their rule, the game forming itself, as had often happened
before, of Mr. Verver with Mrs. Assingham for partner and of the Prince
with Mrs. Verver. The Colonel, who had then asked of Maggie license to
relieve his mind of a couple of letters for the earliest post out on
the morrow, was addressing himself to this task at the other end of the
room, and the Princess herself had welcomed the comparatively hushed
hour—for the bridge-players were serious and silent—much in the mood
of a tired actress who has the good fortune to be “off,” while her mates
are on, almost long enough for a nap on the property sofa in the wing.
Maggie’s nap, had she been able to snatch forty winks, would have been
of the spirit rather than of the sense; yet as she subsided, near a
lamp, with the last salmon-coloured French periodical, she was to fail,
for refreshment, even of that sip of independence.
There was no question for her, as she found, of closing her eyes and
getting away; they strayed back to life, in the stillness, over the top
of her Review; she could lend herself to none of those refinements of
the higher criticism with which its pages bristled; she was there, where
her companions were, there again and more than ever there; it was as if,
of a sudden, they had been made, in their personal intensity and their
rare complexity of relation, freshly importunate to her. It was the
first evening there had been no one else. Mrs. Rance and the Lutches
were due the next day; but meanwhile the facts of the situation were
upright for her round the green cloth and the silver flambeaux; the fact
of her father’s wife’s lover facing his mistress; the fact of her
father sitting, all unsounded and unblinking, between them; the fact of
Charlotte keeping it up, keeping up everything, across the table, with
her husband beside her; the fact of Fanny Assingham, wonderful creature,
placed opposite to the three and knowing more about each, probably, when
one came to think, than either of them knew of either. Erect above all
for her was the sharp-edged fact of the relation of the whole group,
individually and collectively, to herself—herself so speciously
eliminated for the hour, but presumably more present to the attention of
each than the next card to be played.
Yes, under that imputation, to her sense, they sat—the imputation of
wondering, beneath and behind all their apparently straight play, if she
weren’t really watching them from her corner and consciously, as might
be said, holding them in her hand. She was asking herself at last how
they could bear it—for, though cards were as nought to her and she
could follow no move, so that she was always, on such occasions, out of
the party, they struck her as conforming alike, in the matter of gravity
and propriety, to the stiff standard of the house. Her father, she
knew, was a high adept, one of the greatest—she had been ever, in her
stupidity, his small, his sole despair; Amerigo excelled easily, as he
understood and practised every art that could beguile large leisure;
Mrs. Assingham and Charlotte, moreover, were accounted as “good”
as members of a sex incapable of the nobler consistency could be.
Therefore, evidently, they were not, all so up to their usual form,
merely passing it off, whether for her or for themselves; and the amount
of enjoyed, or at least achieved, security represented by so complete a
conquest of appearances was what acted on her nerves, precisely, with
a kind of provocative force. She found herself, for five minutes,
thrilling with the idea of the prodigious effect that, just as she sat
there near them, she had at her command; with the sense that if she were
but different—oh, ever so different!—all this high decorum would hang
by a hair. There reigned for her, absolutely, during these vertiginous
moments, that fascination of the monstrous, that temptation of the
horribly possible, which we so often trace by its breaking out suddenly,
lest it should go further, in unexplained retreats and reactions.
After it had been thus vividly before her for a little that, springing
up under her wrong and making them all start, stare and turn pale, she
might sound out their doom in a single sentence, a sentence easy to
choose among several of the lurid—after she had faced that blinding
light and felt it turn to blackness, she rose from her place, laying
aside her magazine, and moved slowly round the room, passing near the
card-players and pausing an instant behind the chairs in turn. Silent
and discreet, she bent a vague mild face upon them, as if to signify
that, little as she followed their doings, she wished them well; and
she took from each, across the table, in the common solemnity, an upward
recognition which she was to carry away with her on her moving out
to the terrace, a few minutes later. Her father and her husband, Mrs.
Assingham and Charlotte, had done nothing but meet her eyes; yet the
difference in these demonstrations made each a separate passage—which
was all the more wonderful since, with the secret behind every face,
they had alike tried to look at her THROUGH it and in denial of it.
It all left her, as she wandered off, with the strangest of
impressions—the sense, forced upon her as never yet, of an appeal, a
positive confidence, from the four pairs of eyes, that was deeper than
any negation, and that seemed to speak, on the part of each, of some
relation to be contrived by her, a relation with herself, which would
spare the individual the danger, the actual present strain, of the
relation with the others. They thus tacitly put it upon her to be
disposed of, the whole complexity of their peril, and she promptly saw
why because she was there, and there just as she was, to lift it off
them and take it; to charge herself with it as the scapegoat of old,
of whom she had once seen a terrible picture, had been charged with the
sins of the people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under his
burden and die. That indeed wasn’t THEIR design and their interest, that
she should sink under hers; it wouldn’t be their feeling that she should
do anything but live, live on somehow for their benefit, and even as
much as possible in their company, to keep proving to them that they had
truly escaped and that she was still there to simplify. This idea of
her simplifying, and of their combined struggle, dim as yet but steadily
growing, toward the perception of her adopting it from them, clung to
her while she hovered on the terrace, where the summer night was so soft
that she scarce needed the light shawl she had picked up. Several of the
long windows of the occupied rooms stood open to it, and the light came
out in vague shafts and fell upon the old smooth stones. The hour was
moonless and starless and the air heavy and still—which was why, in her
evening dress, she need fear no chill and could get away, in the outer
darkness, from that provocation of opportunity which had assaulted her,
within, on her sofa, as a beast might have leaped at her throat.
Nothing in fact was stranger than the way in which, when she had
remained there a little, her companions, watched by her through one of
the windows, actually struck her as almost consciously and gratefully
safer. They might have been—really charming as they showed in the
beautiful room, and Charlotte certainly, as always, magnificently
handsome and supremely distinguished—they might have been figures
rehearsing some play of which she herself was the author; they might
even, for the happy appearance they continued to present, have been
such figures as would, by the strong note of character in each, fill
any author with the certitude of success, especially of their own
histrionic. They might in short have represented any mystery they would;
the point being predominantly that the key to the mystery, the key that
could wind and unwind it without a snap of the spring, was there in
her pocket—or rather, no doubt, clasped at this crisis in her hand and
pressed, as she walked back and forth, to her breast. She walked to
the end and far out of the light; she returned and saw the others still
where she had left them; she passed round the house and looked into
the drawing-room, lighted also, but empty now, and seeming to speak
the more, in its own voice, of all the possibilities she controlled.
Spacious and splendid, like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was
a scene she might people, by the press of her spring, either with
serenities and dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames and
ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of her golden bowl she
was trying so hard to pick up.
She continued to walk and continued to pause; she stopped afresh for
the look into the smoking-room, and by this time—it was as if the
recognition had of itself arrested her—she saw as in a picture, with
the temptation she had fled from quite extinct, why it was she had been
able to give herself so little, from the first, to the vulgar heat of
her wrong. She might fairly, as she watched them, have missed it as a
lost thing; have yearned for it, for the straight vindictive view, the
rights of resentment, the rages of jealousy, the protests of passion,
as for something she had been cheated of not least: a range of feelings
which for many women would have meant so much, but which for HER
husband’s wife, for HER father’s daughter, figured nothing nearer to
experience than a wild eastern caravan, looming into view with crude
colours in the sun, fierce pipes in the air, high spears against the
sky, all a thrill, a natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short
before it reached her and plunging into other defiles. She saw at
all events why horror itself had almost failed her; the horror that,
foreshadowed in advance, would, by her thought, have made everything
that was unaccustomed in her cry out with pain; the horror of finding
evil seated, all at its ease, where she had only dreamed of good; the
horror of the thing HIDEOUSLY behind, behind so much trusted, so much
pretended, nobleness, cleverness, tenderness. It was the first sharp
falsity she had known in her life, to touch at all, or be touched by;
it had met her like some bad-faced stranger surprised in one of the
thick-carpeted corridors of a house of quiet on a Sunday afternoon; and
yet, yes, amazingly, she had been able to look at terror and disgust
only to know that she must put away from her the bitter-sweet of their
freshness. The sight, from the window, of the group so constituted, TOLD
her why, told her how, named to her, as with hard lips, named straight
AT her, so that she must take it full in the face, that other possible
relation to the whole fact which alone would bear upon her irresistibly.
It was extraordinary: they positively brought home to her that to feel
about them in any of the immediate, inevitable, assuaging ways, the ways
usually open to innocence outraged and generosity betrayed, would have
been to give them up, and that giving them up was, marvellously, not
to be thought of. She had never, from the first hour of her state of
acquired conviction, given them up so little as now; though she was, no
doubt, as the consequence of a step taken a few minutes later, to invoke
the conception of doing that, if might be, even less. She had resumed
her walk—stopping here and there, while she rested on the cool smooth
stone balustrade, to draw it out; in the course of which, after a
little, she passed again the lights of the empty drawing-room and paused
again for what she saw and felt there.
It was not at once, however, that this became quite concrete; that was
the effect of her presently making out that Charlotte was in the room,
launched and erect there, in the middle, and looking about her; that she
had evidently just come round to it, from her card-table, by one of
the passages—with the expectation, to all appearance, of joining her
stepdaughter. She had pulled up at seeing the great room empty—Maggie
not having passed out, on leaving the group, in a manner to be observed.
So definite a quest of her, with the bridge-party interrupted or altered
for it, was an impression that fairly assailed the Princess, and to
which something of attitude and aspect, of the air of arrested pursuit
and purpose, in Charlotte, together with the suggestion of her next
vague movements, quickly added its meaning. This meaning was that she
had decided, that she had been infinitely conscious of Maggie’s presence
before, that she knew that she would at last find her alone, and that
she wanted her, for some reason, enough to have presumably called on
Bob Assingham for aid. He had taken her chair and let her go, and the
arrangement was for Maggie a signal proof of her earnestness; of the
energy, in fact, that, though superficially commonplace in a situation
in which people weren’t supposed to be watching each other, was what
affected our young woman, on the spot, as a breaking of bars. The
splendid shining supple creature was out of the cage, was at large; and
the question now almost grotesquely rose of whether she mightn’t by some
art, just where she was and before she could go further, be hemmed in
and secured. It would have been for a moment, in this case, a matter
of quickly closing the windows and giving the alarm—with poor Maggie’s
sense that, though she couldn’t know what she wanted of her, it was
enough for trepidation that, at these firm hands, anything should be
to say nothing of the sequel of a flight taken again along the terrace,
even under the shame of the confessed feebleness of such evasions on the
part of an outraged wife. It was to this feebleness, none the less, that
the outraged wife had presently resorted; the most that could be
said for her being, as she felt while she finally stopped short, at a
distance, that she could at any rate resist her abjection sufficiently
not to sneak into the house by another way and safely reach her room.
She had literally caught herself in the act of dodging and ducking, and
it told her there, vividly, in a single word, what she had all along
been most afraid of.
She had been afraid of the particular passage with Charlotte that would
determine her father’s wife to take him into her confidence as she
couldn’t possibly as yet have done, to prepare for him a statement
of her wrong, to lay before him the infamy of what she was apparently
suspected of. This, should she have made up her mind to do it, would
rest on a calculation the thought of which evoked, strangely, other
possibilities and visions. It would show her as sufficiently believing
in her grasp of her husband to be able to assure herself that, with his
daughter thrown on the defensive, with Maggie’s cause and Maggie’s word,
in fine, against her own, it wasn’t Maggie’s that would most certainly
carry the day. Such a glimpse of her conceivable idea, which would be
founded on reasons all her own, reasons of experience and assurance,
impenetrable to others, but intimately familiar to herself—such a
glimpse opened out wide as soon as it had come into view; for if so much
as this was still firm ground between the elder pair, if the beauty of
appearances had been so consistently preserved, it was only the golden
bowl as Maggie herself knew it that had been broken. The breakage stood
not for any wrought discomposure among the triumphant three—it stood
merely for the dire deformity of her attitude toward them. She was
unable at the minute, of course, fully to measure the difference thus
involved for her, and it remained inevitably an agitating image, the
way it might be held over her that if she didn’t, of her own prudence,
satisfy Charlotte as to the reference, in her mocking spirit, of so much
of the unuttered and unutterable, of the constantly and unmistakably
implied, her father would be invited without further ceremony to
recommend her to do so. But ANY confidence, ANY latent operating
insolence, that Mrs. Verver should, thanks to her large native
resources, continue to be possessed of and to hold in reserve, glimmered
suddenly as a possible working light and seemed to offer, for meeting
her, a new basis and something like a new system. Maggie felt, truly, a
rare contraction of the heart on making out, the next instant, what the
new system would probably have to be—and she had practically done that
before perceiving that the thing she feared had already taken place.
Charlotte, extending her search, appeared now to define herself vaguely
in the distance; of this, after an instant, the Princess was sure,
though the darkness was thick, for the projected clearness of the
smoking-room windows had presently contributed its help. Her friend came
slowly into that circle—having also, for herself, by this time, not
indistinguishably discovered that Maggie was on the terrace. Maggie,
from the end, saw her stop before one of the windows to look at the
group within, and then saw her come nearer and pause again, still with a
considerable length of the place between them.
Yes, Charlotte had seen she was watching her from afar, and had stopped
now to put her further attention to the test. Her face was fixed on her,
through the night; she was the creature who had escaped by force from
her cage, yet there was in her whole motion assuredly, even as so dimly
discerned, a kind of portentous intelligent stillness. She had escaped
with an intention, but with an intention the more definite that it
could so accord with quiet measures. The two women, at all events, only
hovered there, for these first minutes, face to face over their interval
and exchanging no sign; the intensity of their mutual look might have
pierced the night, and Maggie was at last to start with the scared sense
of having thus yielded to doubt, to dread, to hesitation, for a time
that, with no other proof needed, would have completely given her away.
How long had she stood staring?—a single minute or five? Long enough,
in any case, to have felt herself absolutely take from her visitor
something that the latter threw upon her, irresistibly, by this effect
of silence, by this effect of waiting and watching, by this effect,
unmistakably, of timing her indecision and her fear. If then, scared and
hanging back, she had, as was so evident, sacrificed all past pretences,
it would have been with the instant knowledge of an immense advantage
gained that Charlotte finally saw her come on. Maggie came on with her
heart in her hands; she came on with the definite prevision, throbbing
like the tick of a watch, of a doom impossibly sharp and hard, but to
which, after looking at it with her eyes wide open, she had none the
less bowed her head. By the time she was at her companion’s side, for
that matter, by the time Charlotte had, without a motion, without a
word, simply let her approach and stand there, her head was already
on the block, so that the consciousness that everything had now gone
blurred all perception of whether or no the axe had fallen. Oh, the
“advantage,” it was perfectly enough, in truth, with Mrs. Verver; for
what was Maggie’s own sense but that of having been thrown over on her
back, with her neck, from the first, half broken and her helpless face
staring up? That position only could account for the positive grimace of
weakness and pain produced there by Charlotte’s dignity.
“I’ve come to join you—I thought you would be here.”
“Oh yes, I’m here,” Maggie heard herself return a little flatly. “It’s
too close in-doors.”
“Very—but close even here.” Charlotte was still and grave—she had even
uttered her remark about the temperature with an expressive weight that
verged upon solemnity; so that Maggie, reduced to looking vaguely about
at the sky, could only feel her not fail of her purpose. “The air’s
heavy as if with thunder—I think there’ll be a storm.” She made the
suggestion to carry off an awkwardness—which was a part, always, of
her companion’s gain; but the awkwardness didn’t diminish in the silence
that followed. Charlotte had said nothing in reply; her brow was dark
as with a fixed expression, and her high elegance, her handsome head
and long, straight neck testified, through the dusk, to their inveterate
completeness and noble erectness. It was as if what she had come out
to do had already begun, and when, as a consequence, Maggie had said
helplessly, “Don’t you want something? won’t you have my shawl?”
everything might have crumbled away in the comparative poverty of the
tribute. Mrs. Verver’s rejection of it had the brevity of a sign that
they hadn’t closed in for idle words, just as her dim, serious face,
uninterruptedly presented until they moved again, might have represented
the success with which she watched all her message penetrate. They
presently went back the way she had come, but she stopped Maggie again
within range of the smoking-room window and made her stand where the
party at cards would be before her. Side by side, for three minutes,
they fixed this picture of quiet harmonies, the positive charm of it
and, as might have been said, the full significance—which, as was now
brought home to Maggie, could be no more, after all, than a matter of
interpretation, differing always for a different interpreter. As she
herself had hovered in sight of it a quarter-of-an-hour before, it would
have been a thing for her to show Charlotte—to show in righteous irony,
in reproach too stern for anything but silence. But now it was she
who was being shown it, and shown it by Charlotte, and she saw quickly
enough that, as Charlotte showed it, so she must at present submissively
seem to take it.
The others were absorbed and unconscious, either silent over their game
or dropping remarks unheard on the terrace; and it was to her father’s
quiet face, discernibly expressive of nothing that was in his daughter’s
mind, that our young woman’s attention was most directly given. His wife
and his daughter were both closely watching him, and to which of them,
could he have been notified of this, would his raised eyes first, all
impulsively, have responded; in which of them would he have felt it most
important to destroy—for HIS clutch at the equilibrium—any germ of
uneasiness? Not yet, since his marriage, had Maggie so sharply and
so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided
and contested. She was looking at him by Charlotte’s leave and under
Charlotte’s direction; quite in fact as if the particular way she should
look at him were prescribed to her; quite, even, as if she had been
defied to look at him in any other. It came home to her too that
the challenge wasn’t, as might be said, in his interest and for his
protection, but, pressingly, insistently, in Charlotte’s, for that of
HER security at any price. She might verily, by this dumb demonstration,
have been naming to Maggie the price, naming it as a question for Maggie
herself, a sum of money that she, properly, was to find. She must remain
safe and Maggie must pay—what she was to pay with being her own affair.
Straighter than ever, thus, the Princess again felt it all put upon
her, and there was a minute, just a supreme instant, during which
there burned in her a wild wish that her father would only look up. It
throbbed for these seconds as a yearning appeal to him—she would chance
it, that is, if he would but just raise his eyes and catch them, across
the larger space, standing in the outer dark together. Then he might
be affected by the sight, taking them as they were; he might make some
sign—she scarce knew what—that would save her; save her from being
the one, this way, to pay all. He might somehow show a preference—
distinguishing between them; might, out of pity for her, signal to her
that this extremity of her effort for him was more than he asked. That
represented Maggie’s one little lapse from consistency—the sole small
deflection in the whole course of her scheme. It had come to nothing the
next minute, for the dear man’s eyes had never moved, and Charlotte’s
hand, promptly passed into her arm, had already, had very firmly
drawn her on—quite, for that matter, as from some sudden, some equal
perception on her part too of the more ways than one in which their
impression could appeal. They retraced their steps along the rest of the
terrace, turning the corner of the house, and presently came abreast of
the other windows, those of the pompous drawing-room, still lighted and
still empty. Here Charlotte again paused, and it was again as if she
were pointing out what Maggie had observed for herself, the very look
the place had of being vivid in its stillness, of having, with all its
great objects as ordered and balanced as for a formal reception, been
appointed for some high transaction, some real affair of state. In
presence of this opportunity she faced her companion once more; she
traced in her the effect of everything she had already communicated; she
signified, with the same success, that the terrace and the sullen night
would bear too meagre witness to the completion of her idea. Soon enough
then, within the room, under the old lustres of Venice and the eyes of
the several great portraits, more or less contemporary with these, that
awaited on the walls of Fawns their final far migration—soon enough
Maggie found herself staring, and at first all too gaspingly, at the
grand total to which each separate demand Mrs. Verver had hitherto made
upon her, however she had made it, now amounted.
“I’ve been wanting—and longer than you’d perhaps believe—to put a
question to you for which no opportunity has seemed to me yet quite so
good as this. It would have been easier perhaps if you had struck me as
in the least disposed ever to give me one. I have to take it now, you
see, as I find it.” They stood in the centre of the immense room, and
Maggie could feel that the scene of life her imagination had made of it
twenty minutes before was by this time sufficiently peopled. These few
straight words filled it to its uttermost reaches, and nothing was now
absent from her consciousness, either, of the part she was called upon
to play in it. Charlotte had marched straight in, dragging her rich
train; she rose there beautiful and free, with her whole aspect and
action attuned to the firmness of her speech. Maggie had kept the shawl
she had taken out with her, and, clutching it tight in her nervousness,
drew it round her as if huddling in it for shelter, covering herself
with it for humility. She looked out as from under an improvised
hood—the sole headgear of some poor woman at somebody’s proud door;
she waited even like the poor woman; she met her friend’s eyes
with recognitions she couldn’t suppress. She might sound it as she
could—“What question then?”—everything in her, from head to foot,
crowded it upon Charlotte that she knew. She knew too well—that she was
showing; so that successful vagueness, to save some scrap of her dignity
from the imminence of her defeat, was already a lost cause, and the
one thing left was if possible, at any cost, even that of stupid
inconsequence, to try to look as if she weren’t afraid. If she could but
appear at all not afraid she might appear a little not ashamed—that
is not ashamed to be afraid, which was the kind of shame that could
be fastened on her, it being fear all the while that moved her. Her
challenge, at any rate, her wonder, her terror—the blank, blurred
surface, whatever it was that she presented became a mixture that ceased
to signify; for to the accumulated advantage by which Charlotte was at
present sustained her next words themselves had little to add.
“Have you any ground of complaint of me? Is there any wrong you consider
I’ve done you? I feel at last that I’ve a right to ask you.”
Their eyes had to meet on it, and to meet long; Maggie’s avoided at
least the disgrace of looking away. “What makes you want to ask it?”
“My natural desire to know. You’ve done that, for so long, little
justice.”
Maggie waited a moment. “For so long? You mean you’ve thought—?”
“I mean, my dear, that I’ve seen. I’ve seen, week after week, that YOU
seemed to be thinking—of something that perplexed or worried you. Is it
anything for which I’m in any degree responsible?”
Maggie summoned all her powers. “What in the world SHOULD it be?”
“Ah, that’s not for me to imagine, and I should be very sorry to have
to try to say! I’m aware of no point whatever at which I may have failed
you,” said Charlotte; “nor of any at which I may have failed any one
in whom I can suppose you sufficiently interested to care. If I’ve been
guilty of some fault I’ve committed it all unconsciously, and am only
anxious to hear from you honestly about it. But if I’ve been mistaken
as to what I speak of—the difference, more and more marked, as I’ve
thought, in all your manner to me—why, obviously, so much the
better. No form of correction received from you could give me greater
satisfaction.”
She spoke, it struck her companion, with rising, with extraordinary
ease; as if hearing herself say it all, besides seeing the way it was
listened to, helped her from point to point. She saw she was right—that
this WAS the tone for her to take and the thing for her to do, the thing
as to which she was probably feeling that she had in advance, in
her delays and uncertainties, much exaggerated the difficulty. The
difficulty was small, and it grew smaller as her adversary continued
to shrink; she was not only doing as she wanted, but had by this time
effectively done it and hung it up. All of which but deepened Maggie’s
sense of the sharp and simple need, now, of seeing her through to the
end. “‘If’ you’ve been mistaken, you say?”—and the Princess but barely
faltered. “You HAVE been mistaken.”
Charlotte looked at her splendidly hard. “You’re perfectly sure it’s ALL
my mistake?”
“All I can say is that you’ve received a false impression.”
“Ah then—so much the better! From the moment I HAD received it I knew I
must sooner or later speak of it—for that, you see, is, systematically,
my way. And now,” Charlotte added, “you make me glad I’ve spoken. I
thank you very much.”
It was strange how for Maggie too, with this, the difficulty seemed to
sink. Her companion’s acceptance of her denial was like a general pledge
not to keep things any worse for her than they essentially had to be; it
positively helped her to build up her falsehood—to which, accordingly,
she contributed another block. “I’ve affected you evidently—quite
accidentally—in some way of which I’ve been all unaware. I’ve NOT felt
at any time that you’ve wronged me.”
“How could I come within a mile,” Charlotte inquired, “of such a
possibility?”
Maggie, with her eyes on her more easily now, made no attempt to say;
she said, after a little, something more to the present point. “I accuse
you—I accuse you of nothing.”
“Ah, that’s lucky!”
Charlotte had brought this out with the richness, almost, of gaiety; and
Maggie, to go on, had to think, with her own intensity, of Amerigo—to
think how he, on his side, had had to go through with his lie to her,
how it was for his wife he had done so, and how his doing so had
given her the clue and set her the example. He must have had his own
difficulty about it, and she was not, after all, falling below him. It
was in fact as if, thanks to her hovering image of him confronted with
this admirable creature even as she was confronted, there glowed upon
her from afar, yet straight and strong, a deep explanatory light which
covered the last inch of the ground. He had given her something to
conform to, and she hadn’t unintelligently turned on him, “gone back on”
him, as he would have said, by not conforming. They were together thus,
he and she, close, close together—whereas Charlotte, though rising
there radiantly before her, was really off in some darkness of space
that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care. The heart of
the Princess swelled, accordingly, even in her abasement; she had kept
in tune with the right, and something, certainly, something that might
be like a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and
possibly soon, come of it for her. The right, the right—yes, it took
this extraordinary form of her humbugging, as she had called it, to the
end. It was only a question of not, by a hair’s breadth, deflecting into
the truth. So, supremely, was she braced. “You must take it from me that
your anxiety rests quite on a misconception. You must take it from
me that I’ve never at any moment fancied I could suffer by you.” And,
marvellously, she kept it up—not only kept it up, but improved on
it. “You must take it from me that I’ve never thought of you but as
beautiful, wonderful and good. Which is all, I think, that you can
possibly ask.”
Charlotte held her a moment longer: she needed—not then to have
appeared only tactless—the last word. “It’s much more, my dear, than I
dreamed of asking. I only wanted your denial.”
“Well then, you have it.”
“Upon your honour?”
“Upon my honour:”
And she made a point even, our young woman, of not turning away. Her
grip of her shawl had loosened—she had let it fall behind her; but she
stood there for anything more and till the weight should be lifted.
With which she saw soon enough what more was to come. She saw it in
Charlotte’s face, and felt it make between them, in the air, a chill
that completed the coldness of their conscious perjury. “Will you kiss
me on it then?”
She couldn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no; what availed her still,
however, was to measure, in her passivity, how much too far Charlotte
had come to retreat. But there was something different also, something
for which, while her cheek received the prodigious kiss, she had her
opportunity—the sight of the others, who, having risen from their cards
to join the absent members of their party, had reached the open door
at the end of the room and stopped short, evidently, in presence of
the demonstration that awaited them. Her husband and her father were in
front, and Charlotte’s embrace of her—which wasn’t to be distinguished,
for them, either, she felt, from her embrace of Charlotte—took on with
their arrival a high publicity.