The resemblance had not been present to her on first coming out into the
hot, still brightness of the Sunday afternoon—only the second Sunday,
of all the summer, when the party of six, the party of seven including
the Principino, had practically been without accessions or invasions;
but within sight of Charlotte, seated far away, very much where she
had expected to find her, the Princess fell to wondering if her friend
wouldn’t be affected quite as she herself had been, that night on the
terrace, under Mrs. Verver’s perceptive pursuit. The relation, to-day,
had turned itself round; Charlotte was seeing her come, through patches
of lingering noon, quite as she had watched Charlotte menace her through
the starless dark; and there was a moment, that of her waiting a little
as they thus met across the distance, when the interval was bridged by
a recognition not less soundless, and to all appearance not less charged
with strange meanings, than that of the other occasion. The point,
however, was that they had changed places; Maggie had from her window,
seen her stepmother leave the house—at so unlikely an hour, three
o’clock of a canicular August, for a ramble in garden or grove—and had
thereupon felt her impulse determined with the same sharpness that
had made the spring of her companion’s three weeks before. It was the
hottest day of the season, and the shaded siesta, for people all at
their ease, would certainly rather have been prescribed; but our young
woman had perhaps not yet felt it so fully brought home that such
refinements of repose, among them, constituted the empty chair at the
feast. This was the more distinct as the feast, literally, in the great
bedimmed dining-room, the cool, ceremonious semblance of luncheon, had
just been taking place without Mrs. Verver. She had been represented but
by the plea of a bad headache, not reported to the rest of the company
by her husband, but offered directly to Mr. Verver himself, on their
having assembled, by her maid, deputed for the effect and solemnly
producing it.
Maggie had sat down, with the others, to viands artfully iced, to
the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked reserves
of reference in many directions—poor Fanny Assingham herself scarce
thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into which she had
withdrawn. A consensus of languor, which might almost have been taken
for a community of dread, ruled the scene—relieved only by the fitful
experiments of Father Mitchell, good holy, hungry man, a trusted and
overworked London friend and adviser, who had taken, for a week or two,
the light neighbouring service, local rites flourishing under Maggie’s
munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties of the
house. HE conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell—conversed mainly
with the indefinite, wandering smile of the entertainers, and the
Princess’s power to feel him on the whole a blessing for these occasions
was not impaired by what was awkward in her consciousness of having,
from the first of her trouble, really found her way without his
guidance. She asked herself at times if he suspected how more than
subtly, how perversely, she had dispensed with him, and she balanced
between visions of all he must privately have guessed and certitudes
that he had guessed nothing whatever. He might nevertheless have been
so urbanely filling up gaps, at present, for the very reason that his
instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had sufficiently
served him—made him aware of the thin ice, figuratively speaking, and
of prolongations of tension, round about him, mostly foreign to the
circles in which luxury was akin to virtue. Some day in some happier
season, she would confess to him that she hadn’t confessed, though
taking so much on her conscience; but just now she was carrying in her
weak, stiffened hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had
recorded a vow that no drop should overflow. She feared the very breath
of a better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help
itself; and, in addition, however that might be, she drew breath this
afternoon, as never yet, in an element heavy to oppression. Something
grave had happened, somehow and somewhere, and she had, God knew, her
choice of suppositions: her heart stood still when she wondered above
all if the cord mightn’t at last have snapped between her husband and
her father. She shut her eyes for dismay at the possibility of such a
passage—there moved before them the procession of ugly forms it might
have taken. “Find out for yourself!” she had thrown to Amerigo, for
her last word, on the question of who else “knew,” that night of the
breaking of the Bowl; and she flattered herself that she hadn’t since
then helped him, in her clear consistency, by an inch. It was what she
had given him, all these weeks, to be busy with, and she had again and
again lain awake for the obsession of this sense of his uncertainty
ruthlessly and endlessly playing with his dignity. She had handed him
over to an ignorance that couldn’t even try to become indifferent
and that yet wouldn’t project itself, either, into the cleared air of
conviction. In proportion as he was generous it had bitten into his
spirit, and more than once she had said to herself that to break the
spell she had cast upon him and that the polished old ivory of her
father’s inattackable surface made so absolute, he would suddenly commit
some mistake or some violence, smash some windowpane for air, fail even
of one of his blest inveteracies of taste. In that way, fatally, he
would have put himself in the wrong—blighting by a single false step
the perfection of his outward show.
These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell prattled; with
other shadows as well, those that hung over Charlotte herself,
those that marked her as a prey to equal suspicions—to the idea, in
particular, of a change, such a change as she didn’t dare to face, in
the relations of the two men. Or there were yet other possibilities, as
it seemed to Maggie; there were always too many, and all of them things
of evil when one’s nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could
do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the
predicament of the night-watcher in a beast-haunted land who has no
more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost
anything of any one; anything, almost, of poor Bob Assingham, condemned
to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father’s wine;
anything, verily, yes, of the good priest, as he finally sat back with
fat folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach. The good priest
looked hard at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert—he
eyed them, half-obliquely, as if THEY might have met him to-day, for
conversation, better than any one present. But the Princess had her
fancy at last about that too; she was in the midst of a passage, before
she knew it, between Father Mitchell and Charlotte—some approach
he would have attempted with her, that very morning perhaps, to the
circumstance of an apparent detachment, recently noted in her, from any
practice of devotion. He would have drawn from this, say, his artless
inference—taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and
pointed, naturally, the moral that the way out of such straits was
not through neglect of the grand remedy. He had possibly prescribed
contrition—he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that false
repose to which our young woman’s own act had devoted her at her all so
deluded instance. The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the
imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses.
The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do—she
could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive; whereas the
failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her
everything, and all the more that it was wrapped so in confidence.
She had to confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the
justice and felicity of her exemption—so that wouldn’t there have
been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell’s, depths of
practical derision of her success?
The question was provisionally answered, at all events, by the time the
party at luncheon had begun to disperse—with Maggie’s version of Mrs.
Verver sharp to the point of representing her pretext for absence as
a positive flight from derision. She met the good priest’s eyes before
they separated, and priests were really, at the worst, so to speak, such
wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of
saying to her, in abysmal softness: “Go to Mrs. Verver, my child—YOU
go: you’ll find that you can help her.” This didn’t come, however;
nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied
stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the
hand employed at Fawns for mayonnaise of salmon. Nothing came but
the receding backs of each of the others—her father’s slightly bent
shoulders, in especial, which seemed to weave his spell, by the force of
habit, not less patiently than if his wife had been present. Her husband
indeed was present to feel anything there might be to feel—which was
perhaps exactly why this personage was moved promptly to emulate so
definite an example of “sloping.” He had his occupations—books to
arrange perhaps even at Fawns; the idea of the siesta, moreover, in all
the conditions, had no need to be loudly invoked. Maggie, was, in the
event, left alone for a minute with Mrs. Assingham, who, after waiting
for safety, appeared to have at heart to make a demonstration. The stage
of “talking over” had long passed for them; when they communicated now
it was on quite ultimate facts; but Fanny desired to testify to the
existence, on her part, of an attention that nothing escaped. She was
like the kind lady who, happening to linger at the circus while the
rest of the spectators pour grossly through the exits, falls in with the
overworked little trapezist girl—the acrobatic support presumably
of embarrassed and exacting parents—and gives her, as an obscure and
meritorious artist, assurance of benevolent interest. What was clearest,
always, in our young woman’s imaginings, was the sense of being herself
left, for any occasion, in the breach. She was essentially there to bear
the burden, in the last resort, of surrounding omissions and evasions,
and it was eminently to that office she had been to-day abandoned—with
this one alleviation, as appeared, of Mrs. Assingham’s keeping up
with her. Mrs. Assingham suggested that she too was still on the
ramparts—though her gallantry proved indeed after a moment to consist
not a little of her curiosity. She had looked about and seen their
companions beyond earshot.
“Don’t you really want us to go—?”
Maggie found a faint smile. “Do you really want to—?”
It made her friend colour. “Well then—no. But we WOULD, you know, at a
look from you. We’d pack up and be off—as a sacrifice.”
“Ah, make no sacrifice,” said Maggie. “See me through.”
“That’s it—that’s all I want. I should be too base—! Besides,” Fanny
went on, “you’re too splendid.”
“Splendid?”
“Splendid. Also, you know, you ARE all but ‘through.’ You’ve done it,”
said Mrs. Assingham. But Maggie only half took it from her.
“What does it strike you that I’ve done?”
“What you wanted. They’re going.”
Maggie continued to look at her. “Is that what I wanted?”
“Oh, it wasn’t for you to say. That was his business.”
“My father’s?” Maggie asked after an hesitation.
“Your father’s. He has chosen—and now she knows. She sees it all before
her—and she can’t speak, or resist, or move a little finger. That’s
what’s the matter with HER,” said Fanny Assingham.
It made a picture, somehow, for the Princess, as they stood there—the
picture that the words of others, whatever they might be, always made
for her, even when her vision was already charged, better than any
words of her own. She saw, round about her, through the chinks of the
shutters, the hard glare of nature—saw Charlotte, somewhere in it,
virtually at bay, and yet denied the last grace of any protecting truth.
She saw her off somewhere all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in
her fate. “Has she told you?” she then asked.
Her companion smiled superior. “_I_ don’t need to be told—either! I
see something, thank God, every day.” And then as Maggie might appear to
be wondering what, for instance: “I see the long miles of ocean and the
dreadful great country, State after State—which have never seemed to me
so big or so terrible. I see THEM at last, day by day and step by step,
at the far end—and I see them never come back. But NEVER—simply. I
see the extraordinary ‘interesting’ place—which I’ve never been to, you
know, and you have—and the exact degree in which she will be expected
to be interested.”
“She WILL be,” Maggie presently replied. “Expected?”
“Interested.”
For a little, after this, their eyes met on it; at the end of which
Fanny said: “She’ll be—yes—what she’ll HAVE to be. And it will
be—won’t it? for ever and ever.” She spoke as abounding in her friend’s
sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her.
These were large words and large visions—all the more that now, really,
they spread and spread. In the midst of them, however, Mrs. Assingham
had soon enough continued. “When I talk of ‘knowing,’ indeed, I don’t
mean it as you would have a right to do. You know because you see—and I
don’t see HIM. I don’t make him out,” she almost crudely confessed.
Maggie again hesitated. “You mean you don’t make out Amerigo?”
But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to one’s
intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of everything,
long been superseded. Then Maggie measured the reach of her allusion,
and how what she next said gave her meaning a richness. No other name
was to be spoken, and Mrs. Assingham had taken that, without delay, from
her eyes—with a discretion, still, that fell short but by an inch. “You
know how he feels.”
Maggie at this then slowly matched her headshake. “I know nothing.”
“You know how YOU feel.”
But again she denied it. “I know nothing. If I did—!”
“Well, if you did?” Fanny asked as she faltered.
She had had enough, however. “I should die,” she said as she turned
away.
She went to her room, through the quiet house; she roamed there a
moment, picking up, pointlessly, a different fan, and then took her way
to the shaded apartments in which, at this hour, the Principino would
be enjoying his nap. She passed through the first empty room, the day
nursery, and paused at an open door. The inner room, large, dim and
cool, was equally calm; her boy’s ample, antique, historical, royal
crib, consecrated, reputedly, by the guarded rest of heirs-apparent, and
a gift, early in his career, from his grandfather, ruled the scene from
the centre, in the stillness of which she could almost hear the child’s
soft breathing. The prime protector of his dreams was installed beside
him; her father sat there with as little motion—with head thrown back
and supported, with eyes apparently closed, with the fine foot that
was so apt to betray nervousness at peace upon the other knee, with
the unfathomable heart folded in the constant flawless freshness of
the white waistcoat that could always receive in its armholes the firm
prehensile thumbs. Mrs. Noble had majestically melted, and the whole
place signed her temporary abdication; yet the actual situation was
regular, and Maggie lingered but to look. She looked over her fan, the
top of which was pressed against her face, long enough to wonder if her
father really slept or if, aware of her, he only kept consciously quiet.
Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she to
take this—his forebearance from any question—only as a sign again that
everything was left to her? She at all events, for a minute, watched
his immobility—then, as if once more renewing her total submission,
returned, without a sound, to her own quarters.
A strange impulse was sharp in her, but it was not, for her part, the
desire to shift the weight. She could as little have slept as she could
have slept that morning, days before, when she had watched the first
dawn from her window. Turned to the east, this side of her room was now
in shade, with the two wings of the casement folded back and the charm
she always found in her seemingly perched position—as if her outlook,
from above the high terraces, was that of some castle-tower mounted on
a rock. When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the
woods—all of which drowsed below her, at this hour, in the immensity of
light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of flowers looked
dim; the peacocks on the balustrades let their tails hang limp and the
smaller birds lurked among the leaves. Nothing therefore would have
appeared to stir in the brilliant void if Maggie, at the moment she was
about to turn away, had not caught sight of a moving spot, a clear green
sunshade in the act of descending a flight of steps. It passed down
from the terrace, receding, at a distance, from sight, and carried,
naturally, so as to conceal the head and back of its bearer; but Maggie
had quickly recognised the white dress and the particular motion of this
adventurer—had taken in that Charlotte, of all people, had chosen the
glare of noon for an exploration of the gardens, and that she could be
betaking herself only to some unvisited quarter deep in them, or beyond
them, that she had already marked as a superior refuge. The Princess
kept her for a few minutes in sight, watched her long enough to feel
her, by the mere betrayal of her pace and direction, driven in a kind of
flight, and then understood, for herself, why the act of sitting still
had become impossible to either of them. There came to her, confusedly,
some echo of an ancient fable—some vision of Io goaded by the gadfly or
of Ariadne roaming the lone sea-strand. It brought with it all the sense
of her own intention and desire; she too might have been, for the hour,
some far-off harassed heroine—only with a part to play for which
she knew, exactly, no inspiring precedent. She knew but that, all the
while—all the while of her sitting there among the others without
her—she had wanted to go straight to this detached member of the party
and make somehow, for her support, the last demonstration. A pretext was
all that was needful, and Maggie after another instant had found
one. She had caught a glimpse, before Mrs. Verver disappeared, of her
carrying a book—made out, half lost in the folds of her white dress,
the dark cover of a volume that was to explain her purpose in case of
her being met with surprise, and the mate of which, precisely, now lay
on Maggie’s table. The book was an old novel that the Princess had a
couple of days before mentioned having brought down from Portland
Place in the charming original form of its three volumes. Charlotte had
hailed, with a specious glitter of interest, the opportunity to read it,
and our young woman had, thereupon, on the morrow, directed her maid to
carry it to Mrs. Verver’s apartments. She was afterwards to observe that
this messenger, unintelligent or inadvertent, had removed but one of
the volumes, which happened not to be the first. Still possessed,
accordingly, of the first while Charlotte, going out, fantastically, at
such an hour, to cultivate romance in an arbour, was helplessly armed
with the second, Maggie prepared on the spot to sally forth with
succour. The right volume, with a parasol, was all she required—in
addition, that is, to the bravery of her general idea. She passed again
through the house, unchallenged, and emerged upon the terrace, which
she followed, hugging the shade, with that consciousness of turning
the tables on her friend which we have already noted. But so far as
she went, after descending into the open and beginning to explore the
grounds, Mrs. Verver had gone still further—with the increase of the
oddity, moreover, of her having exchanged the protection of her room for
these exposed and shining spaces. It was not, fortunately, however,
at last, that by persisting in pursuit one didn’t arrive at regions
of admirable shade: this was the asylum, presumably, that the poor
wandering woman had had in view—several wide alleys, in particular,
of great length, densely overarched with the climbing rose and the
honeysuckle and converging, in separate green vistas, at a sort of
umbrageous temple, an ancient rotunda, pillared and statued, niched and
roofed, yet with its uncorrected antiquity, like that of everything
else at Fawns, conscious hitherto of no violence from the present and
no menace from the future. Charlotte had paused there, in her frenzy, or
what ever it was to be called; the place was a conceivable retreat, and
she was staring before her, from the seat to which she appeared to have
sunk, all unwittingly, as Maggie stopped at the beginning of one of the
perspectives.
It was a repetition more than ever then of the evening on the terrace;
the distance was too great to assure her she had been immediately seen,
but the Princess waited, with her intention, as Charlotte on the other
occasion had waited—allowing, oh allowing, for the difference of the
intention! Maggie was full of the sense of THAT—so full that it made
her impatient; whereupon she moved forward a little, placing herself in
range of the eyes that had been looking off elsewhere, but that she had
suddenly called to recognition. Charlotte had evidently not dreamed of
being followed, and instinctively, with her pale stare, she stiffened
herself for protest. Maggie could make that out—as well as, further,
however, that her second impression of her friend’s approach had an
instant effect on her attitude. The Princess came nearer, gravely and
in silence, but fairly paused again, to give her time for whatever
she would. Whatever she would, whatever she could, was what Maggie
wanted—wanting above all to make it as easy for her as the case
permitted. That was not what Charlotte had wanted the other night, but
this never mattered—the great thing was to allow her, was fairly to
produce in her, the sense of highly choosing. At first, clearly, she had
been frightened; she had not been pursued, it had quickly struck her,
without some design on the part of her pursuer, and what might she
not be thinking of in addition but the way she had, when herself the
pursuer, made her stepdaughter take in her spirit and her purpose? It
had sunk into Maggie at the time, that hard insistence, and Mrs. Verver
had felt it and seen it and heard it sink; which wonderful remembrance
of pressure successfully applied had naturally, till now, remained with
her. But her stare was like a projected fear that the buried treasure,
so dishonestly come by, for which her companion’s still countenance, at
the hour and afterwards, had consented to serve as the deep soil, might
have worked up again to the surface, to be thrown back upon her hands.
Yes, it was positive that during one of these minutes the Princess had
the vision of her particular alarm. “It’s her lie, it’s her lie that has
mortally disagreed with her; she can keep down no longer her rebellion
at it, and she has come to retract it, to disown it and denounce it—to
give me full in my face the truth instead.” This, for a concentrated
instant, Maggie felt her helplessly gasp—but only to let it bring home
the indignity, the pity of her state. She herself could but tentatively
hover, place in view the book she carried, look as little dangerous,
look as abjectly mild, as possible; remind herself really of people she
had read about in stories of the wild west, people who threw up their
hands, on certain occasions, as a sign they weren’t carrying revolvers.
She could almost have smiled at last, troubled as she yet knew herself,
to show how richly she was harmless; she held up her volume, which was
so weak a weapon, and while she continued, for consideration, to keep
her distance, she explained with as quenched a quaver as possible. “I
saw you come out—saw you from my window, and couldn’t bear to think you
should find yourself here without the beginning of your book. THIS is
the beginning; you’ve got the wrong volume, and I’ve brought you out the
right.”
She remained after she had spoken; it was like holding a parley with a
possible adversary, and her intense, her exalted little smile asked for
formal leave. “May I come nearer now?” she seemed to say—as to which,
however, the next minute, she saw Charlotte’s reply lose itself in a
strange process, a thing of several sharp stages, which she could stand
there and trace. The dread, after a minute, had dropped from her face;
though, discernibly enough, she still couldn’t believe in her having, in
so strange a fashion, been deliberately made up to. If she had been made
up to, at least, it was with an idea—the idea that had struck her at
first as necessarily dangerous. That it wasn’t, insistently wasn’t, this
shone from Maggie with a force finally not to be resisted; and on that
perception, on the immense relief so constituted, everything had by the
end of three minutes extraordinarily changed. Maggie had come out to
her, really, because she knew her doomed, doomed to a separation
that was like a knife in her heart; and in the very sight of her
uncontrollable, her blinded physical quest of a peace not to be grasped,
something of Mrs. Assingham’s picture of her as thrown, for a grim
future, beyond the great sea and the great continent had at first found
fulfilment. She had got away, in this fashion—burning behind her,
almost, the ships of disguise—to let her horror of what was before
her play up without witnesses; and even after Maggie’s approach had
presented an innocent front it was still not to be mistaken that she
bristled with the signs of her extremity. It was not to be said for
them, either, that they were draped at this hour in any of her usual
graces; unveiled and all but unashamed, they were tragic to the Princess
in spite of the dissimulation that, with the return of comparative
confidence, was so promptly to operate. How tragic, in essence, the very
change made vivid, the instant stiffening of the spring of pride—this
for possible defence if not for possible aggression. Pride indeed,
the next moment, had become the mantle caught up for protection and
perversity; she flung it round her as a denial of any loss of her
freedom. To be doomed was, in her situation, to have extravagantly
incurred a doom, so that to confess to wretchedness was, by the same
stroke, to confess to falsity. She wouldn’t confess, she didn’t—a
thousand times no; she only cast about her, and quite frankly and
fiercely, for something else that would give colour to her having burst
her bonds. Her eyes expanded, her bosom heaved as she invoked it, and
the effect upon Maggie was verily to wish she could only help her to it.
She presently got up—which seemed to mean “Oh, stay if you like!” and
when she had moved about awhile at random, looking away, looking at
anything, at everything but her visitor; when she had spoken of the
temperature and declared that she revelled in it; when she had uttered
her thanks for the book, which, a little incoherently, with her second
volume, she perhaps found less clever than she expected; when she had
let Maggie approach sufficiently closer to lay, untouched, the tribute
in question on a bench and take up obligingly its superfluous mate: when
she had done these things she sat down in another place, more or less
visibly in possession of her part. Our young woman was to have passed,
in all her adventure, no stranger moments; for she not only now saw her
companion fairly agree to take her then for the poor little person she
was finding it so easy to appear, but fell, in a secret, responsive
ecstasy, to wondering if there were not some supreme abjection with
which she might be inspired. Vague, but increasingly brighter, this
possibility glimmered on her. It at last hung there adequately plain
to Charlotte that she had presented herself once more to (as they said)
grovel; and that, truly, made the stage large. It had absolutely, within
the time, taken on the dazzling merit of being large for each of them
alike.
“I’m glad to see you alone—there’s something I’ve been wanting to say
to you. I’m tired,” said Mrs. Verver, “I’m tired—!”
“Tired—?” It had dropped the next thing; it couldn’t all come at once;
but Maggie had already guessed what it was, and the flush of recognition
was in her face.
“Tired of this life—the one we’ve been leading. You like it, I know,
but I’ve dreamed another dream.” She held up her head now; her lighted
eyes more triumphantly rested; she was finding, she was following
her way. Maggie, by the same influence, sat in sight of it; there was
something she was SAVING, some quantity of which she herself was judge;
and it was for a long moment, even with the sacrifice the Princess
had come to make, a good deal like watching her, from the solid
shore, plunge into uncertain, into possibly treacherous depths. “I see
something else,” she went on; “I’ve an idea that greatly appeals to
me—I’ve had it for a long time. It has come over me that we’re wrong.
Our real life isn’t here.”
Maggie held her breath. “‘Ours’—?”
“My husband’s and mine. I’m not speaking for you.”
“Oh!” said Maggie, only praying not to be, not even to appear, stupid.
“I’m speaking for ourselves. I’m speaking,” Charlotte brought out, “for
HIM.”
“I see. For my father.”
“For your father. For whom else?” They looked at each other hard now,
but Maggie’s face took refuge in the intensity of her interest. She
was not at all even so stupid as to treat her companion’s question as
requiring an answer; a discretion that her controlled stillness had
after an instant justified. “I must risk your thinking me selfish—for
of course you know what it involves. Let me admit it—I AM selfish. I
place my husband first.”
“Well,” said Maggie smiling and smiling, “since that’s where I place
mine—!”
“You mean you’ll have no quarrel with me? So much the better then;
for,” Charlotte went on with a higher and higher flight, “my plan is
completely formed.”
Maggie waited—her glimmer had deepened; her chance somehow was at hand.
The only danger was her spoiling it; she felt herself skirting an abyss.
“What then, may I ask IS your plan?”
It hung fire but ten seconds; it came out sharp. “To take him home—to
his real position. And not to wait.”
“Do you mean—a—this season?”
“I mean immediately. And—I may as well tell you now—I mean for my own
time. I want,” Charlotte said, “to have him at last a little to myself;
I want, strange as it may seem to you”—and she gave it all its weight
“to KEEP the man I’ve married. And to do so, I see, I must act.”
Maggie, with the effort still to follow the right line, felt herself
colour to the eyes. “Immediately?” she thoughtfully echoed.
“As soon as we can get off. The removal of everything is, after all,
but a detail. That can always be done; with money, as he spends it,
everything can. What I ask for,” Charlotte declared, “is the definite
break. And I wish it now.” With which her head, like her voice rose
higher. “Oh,” she added, “I know my difficulty!”
Far down below the level of attention, in she could scarce have said
what sacred depths, Maggie’s inspiration had come, and it had trembled
the next moment into sound. “Do you mean I’M your difficulty?”
“You and he together—since it’s always with you that I’ve had to see
him. But it’s a difficulty that I’m facing, if you wish to know; that
I’ve already faced; that I propose to myself to surmount. The struggle
with it—none too pleasant—hasn’t been for me, as you may imagine, in
itself charming; I’ve felt in it at times, if I must tell you all, too
great and too strange, an ugliness. Yet I believe it may succeed.”
She had risen, with this, Mrs. Verver, and had moved, for the emphasis
of it, a few steps away; while Maggie, motionless at first, but sat and
looked at her. “You want to take my father FROM me?”
The sharp, successful, almost primitive wail in it made Charlotte turn,
and this movement attested for the Princess the felicity of her deceit.
Something in her throbbed as it had throbbed the night she stood in
the drawing-room and denied that she had suffered. She was ready to lie
again if her companion would but give her the opening. Then she should
know she had done all. Charlotte looked at her hard, as if to compare
her face with her note of resentment; and Maggie, feeling this, met it
with the signs of an impression that might pass for the impression of
defeat. “I want really to possess him,” said Mrs. Verver. “I happen also
to feel that he’s worth it.”
Maggie rose as if to receive her. “Oh—worth it!” she wonderfully threw
off.
The tone, she instantly saw, again had its effect: Charlotte flamed
aloft—might truly have been believing in her passionate parade. “You’ve
thought YOU’VE known what he’s worth?”
“Indeed then, my dear, I believe I have—as I believe I still do.”
She had given it, Maggie, straight back, and again it had not missed.
Charlotte, for another moment, only looked at her; then broke into the
words—Maggie had known they would come—of which she had pressed the
spring. “How I see that you loathed our marriage!”
“Do you ASK me?” Maggie after an instant demanded.
Charlotte had looked about her, picked up the parasol she had laid on
a bench, possessed herself mechanically of one of the volumes of the
relegated novel and then, more consciously, flung it down again: she was
in presence, visibly, of her last word. She opened her sunshade with
a click; she twirled it on her shoulder in her pride. “‘Ask’ you? Do I
need? How I see,” she broke out, “that you’ve worked against me!”
“Oh, oh, oh!” the Princess exclaimed.
Her companion, leaving her, had reached one of the archways, but on this
turned round with a flare. “You haven’t worked against me?”
Maggie took it and for a moment kept it; held it, with closed eyes, as
if it had been some captured fluttering bird pressed by both hands to
her breast. Then she opened her eyes to speak. “What does it matter—if
I’ve failed?”
“You recognise then that you’ve failed?” asked Charlotte from the
threshold.
Maggie waited; she looked, as her companion had done a moment before,
at the two books on the seat; she put them together and laid them
down; then she made up her mind. “I’ve failed!” she sounded out before
Charlotte, having given her time, walked away. She watched her, splendid
and erect, float down the long vista; then she sank upon a seat. Yes,
she had done all.