“I’ll do anything you like,” she said to her husband on one of the last
days of the month, “if our being here, this way at this time, seems to
you too absurd, or too uncomfortable, or too impossible. We’ll either
take leave of them now, without waiting—or we’ll come back in time,
three days before they start. I’ll go abroad with you, if you but say
the word; to Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Italian Alps, to whichever of
your old high places you would like most to see again—those beautiful
ones that used to do you good after Rome and that you so often told me
about.”
Where they were, in the conditions that prompted this offer, and where
it might indeed appear ridiculous that, with the stale London September
close at hand, they should content themselves with remaining, was where
the desert of Portland Place looked blank as it had never looked, and
where a drowsy cabman, scanning the horizon for a fare, could sink to
oblivion of the risks of immobility. But Amerigo was of the odd opinion,
day after day, that their situation couldn’t be bettered; and he even
went at no moment through the form of replying that, should their ordeal
strike her as exceeding their patience, any step they might take would
be for her own relief. This was, no doubt, partly because he stood out
so wonderfully, to the end, against admitting, by a weak word at least,
that any element of their existence WAS, or ever had been, an ordeal; no
trap of circumstance, no lapse of “form,” no accident of irritation, had
landed him in that inconsequence. His wife might verily have suggested
that he was consequent—consequent with the admirable appearance he had
from the first so undertaken, and so continued, to present—rather too
rigidly at HER expense; only, as it happened, she was not the little
person to do anything of the sort, and the strange tacit compact
actually in operation between them might have been founded on an
intelligent comparison, a definite collation positively, of the kinds of
patience proper to each. She was seeing him through—he had engaged
to come out at the right end if she WOULD see him: this understanding,
tacitly renewed from week to week, had fairly received, with the
procession of the weeks, the consecration of time; but it scarce needed
to be insisted on that she was seeing him on HIS terms, not all on
hers, or that, in other words, she must allow him his unexplained and
uncharted, his one practicably workable way. If that way, by one of the
intimate felicities the liability to which was so far from having even
yet completely fallen from him, happened handsomely to show him as more
bored than boring (with advantages of his own freely to surrender, but
none to be persuadedly indebted to others for,) what did such a false
face of the matter represent but the fact itself that she was pledged?
If she had questioned or challenged or interfered—if she had reserved
herself that right—she wouldn’t have been pledged; whereas there were
still, and evidently would be yet a while, long, tense stretches
during which their case might have been hanging, for every eye, on her
possible, her impossible defection. She must keep it up to the last,
mustn’t absent herself for three minutes from her post: only on those
lines, assuredly, would she show herself as with him and not against
him.
It was extraordinary how scant a series of signs she had invited him to
make of being, of truly having been at any time, “with” his wife: that
reflection she was not exempt from as they now, in their suspense,
supremely waited—a reflection under the brush of which she recognised
her having had, in respect to him as well, to “do all,” to go the whole
way over, to move, indefatigably, while he stood as fixed in his place
as some statue of one of his forefathers. The meaning of it would seem
to be, she reasoned in sequestered hours, that he HAD a place, and that
this was an attribute somehow indefeasible, unquenchable, which laid
upon others—from the moment they definitely wanted anything of him—
the necessity of taking more of the steps that he could, of circling
round him, of remembering for his benefit the famous relation of the
mountain to Mahomet. It was strange, if one had gone into it, but such
a place as Amerigo’s was like something made for him beforehand by
innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made
by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie’s own had come
to show simply as that improvised “post”—a post of the kind spoken of
as advanced—with which she was to have found herself connected in the
fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even
of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous bead-work
to sell. Maggie’s own, in short, would have been sought in vain in the
most rudimentary map of the social relations as such. The only geography
marking it would be doubtless that of the fundamental passions. The
“end” that the Prince was at all events holding out for was represented
to expectation by his father-in-law’s announced departure for America
with Mrs. Verver; just as that prospective event had originally figured
as advising, for discretion, the flight of the younger couple, to say
nothing of the withdrawal of whatever other importunate company, before
the great upheaval of Fawns. This residence was to be peopled for a
month by porters, packers and hammerers, at whose operations it had
become peculiarly public—public that is for Portland Place—that
Charlotte was to preside in force; operations the quite awful appointed
scale and style of which had at no moment loomed so large to Maggie’s
mind as one day when the dear Assinghams swam back into her ken
besprinkled with sawdust and looking as pale as if they had seen Samson
pull down the temple. They had seen at least what she was not seeing,
rich dim things under the impression of which they had retired; she
having eyes at present but for the clock by which she timed her husband,
or for the glass—the image perhaps would be truer—in which he was
reflected to her as HE timed the pair in the country. The accession of
their friends from Cadogan Place contributed to all their intermissions,
at any rate, a certain effect of resonance; an effect especially marked
by the upshot of a prompt exchange of inquiries between Mrs. Assingham
and the Princess. It was noted, on the occasion of that anxious lady’s
last approach to her young friend at Fawns, that her sympathy had
ventured, after much accepted privation, again to become inquisitive,
and it had perhaps never so yielded to that need as on this question of
the present odd “line” of the distinguished eccentrics.
“You mean to say really that you’re going to stick here?” And then
before Maggie could answer: “What on earth will you do with your
evenings?”
Maggie waited a moment—Maggie could still tentatively smile. “When
people learn we’re here—and of course the papers will be full of
it!—they’ll flock back in their hundreds, from wherever they are, to
catch us. You see you and the Colonel have yourselves done it. As for
our evenings, they won’t, I dare say, be particularly different from
anything else that’s ours. They won’t be different from our mornings or
our afternoons—except perhaps that you two dears will sometimes help us
to get through them. I’ve offered to go anywhere,” she added; “to take
a house if he will. But THIS—just this and nothing else—is Amerigo’s
idea. He gave it yesterday” she went on, “a name that, as, he said,
described and fitted it. So you see”—and the Princess indulged again
in her smile that didn’t play, but that only, as might have been said,
worked—“so you see there’s a method in our madness.”
It drew Mrs. Assingham’s wonder. “And what then is the name?”
“‘The reduction to its simplest expression of what we ARE doing’—that’s
what he called it. Therefore as we’re doing nothing, we’re doing it in
the most aggravated way—which is the way he desires.” With which Maggie
further said: “Of course I understand.”
“So do I!” her visitor after a moment breathed. “You’ve had to vacate
the house—that was inevitable. But at least here he doesn’t funk.”
Our young woman accepted the expression. “He doesn’t funk.”
It only, however, half contented Fanny, who thoughtfully raised her
eyebrows. “He’s prodigious; but what is there—as you’ve ‘fixed’ it—TO
dodge? Unless,” she pursued, “it’s her getting near him; it’s—if you’ll
pardon my vulgarity—her getting AT him. That,” she suggested, “may
count with him.”
But it found the Princess prepared. “She can get near him here. She can
get ‘at’ him. She can come up.”
“CAN she?” Fanny Assingham questioned.
“CAN’T she?” Maggie returned.
Their eyes, for a minute, intimately met on it; after which the elder
woman said: “I mean for seeing him alone.”
“So do I,” said the Princess.
At which Fanny, for her reasons, couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, if it’s for
THAT he’s staying—!”
“He’s staying—I’ve made it out—to take anything that comes or calls
upon him. To take,” Maggie went on, “even that.” Then she put it as she
had at last put it to herself. “He’s staying for high decency.”
“Decency?” Mrs. Assingham gravely echoed.
“Decency. If she SHOULD try—!”
“Well—?” Mrs. Assingham urged.
“Well, I hope—!”
“Hope he’ll see her?”
Maggie hesitated, however; she made no direct reply. “It’s useless
hoping,” she presently said. “She won’t. But he ought to.” Her friend’s
expression of a moment before, which had been apologised for as vulgar,
prolonged its sharpness to her ear—that of an electric bell under
continued pressure. Stated so simply, what was it but dreadful, truly,
that the feasibility of Charlotte’s “getting at” the man who for so
long had loved her should now be in question? Strangest of all things,
doubtless, this care of Maggie’s as to what might make for it or make
against it; stranger still her fairly lapsing at moments into a vague
calculation of the conceivability, on her own part, with her husband,
of some direct sounding of the subject. Would it be too monstrous, her
suddenly breaking out to him as in alarm at the lapse of the weeks:
“Wouldn’t it really seem that you’re bound in honour to do something for
her, privately, before they go?” Maggie was capable of weighing the
risk of this adventure for her own spirit, capable of sinking to intense
little absences, even while conversing, as now, with the person who had
most of her confidence, during which she followed up the possibilities.
It was true that Mrs. Assingham could at such times somewhat restore
the balance—by not wholly failing to guess her thought. Her thought,
however, just at present, had more than one face—had a series that it
successively presented. These were indeed the possibilities involved in
the adventure of her concerning herself for the quantity of compensation
that Mrs. Verver might still look to. There was always the possibility
that she WAS, after all, sufficiently to get at him—there was in fact
that of her having again and again done so. Against this stood
nothing but Fanny Assingham’s apparent belief in her privation—more
mercilessly imposed, or more hopelessly felt, in the actual relation
of the parties; over and beyond everything that, from more than three
months back, of course, had fostered in the Princess a like conviction.
These assumptions might certainly be baseless—inasmuch as there were
hours and hours of Amerigo’s time that there was no habit, no pretence
of his accounting for; inasmuch too as Charlotte, inevitably, had had
more than once, to the undisguised knowledge of the pair in Portland
Place, been obliged to come up to Eaton Square, whence so many of her
personal possessions were in course of removal. She didn’t come to
Portland Place—didn’t even come to ask for luncheon on two separate
occasions when it reached the consciousness of the household there
that she was spending the day in London. Maggie hated, she scorned, to
compare hours and appearances, to weigh the idea of whether there
hadn’t been moments, during these days, when an assignation, in easy
conditions, a snatched interview, in an air the season had so cleared
of prying eyes, mightn’t perfectly work. But the very reason of this was
partly that, haunted with the vision of the poor woman carrying off
with such bravery as she found to her hand the secret of her not being
appeased, she was conscious of scant room for any alternative image.
The alternative image would have been that the secret covered up was the
secret of appeasement somehow obtained, somehow extorted and cherished;
and the difference between the two kinds of hiding was too great to
permit of a mistake. Charlotte was hiding neither pride nor joy—she
was hiding humiliation; and here it was that the Princess’s passion,
so powerless for vindictive flights, most inveterately bruised its
tenderness against the hard glass of her question.
Behind the glass lurked the WHOLE history of the relation she had so
fairly flattened her nose against it to penetrate—the glass Mrs. Verver
might, at this stage, have been frantically tapping, from within, by
way of supreme, irrepressible entreaty. Maggie had said to herself
complacently, after that last passage with her stepmother in the garden
of Fawns, that there was nothing left for her to do and that she could
thereupon fold her hands. But why wasn’t it still left to push further
and, from the point of view of personal pride, grovel lower?—why wasn’t
it still left to offer herself as the bearer of a message reporting to
him their friend’s anguish and convincing him of her need?
She could thus have translated Mrs. Verver’s tap against the glass, as I
have called it, into fifty forms; could perhaps have translated it most
into the form of a reminder that would pierce deep. “You don’t know what
it is to have been loved and broken with. You haven’t been broken with,
because in your RELATION what can there have been, worth speaking of, to
break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with
the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better
meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your
hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? why
condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame—oh,
the golden flame!—a mere handful of black ashes?” Our young woman
so yielded, at moments, to what was insidious in these foredoomed
ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together, sometimes, the
weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her—the duty of speaking
before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some
benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object
of price of the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and
negotiable some day in the market of misery.
This imagined service to the woman who could no longer help herself was
one of the traps set for Maggie’s spirit at every turn of the road;
the click of which, catching and holding the divine faculty fast, was
followed inevitably by a flutter, by a struggle of wings and even, as
we may say, by a scattering of fine feathers. For they promptly enough
felt, these yearnings of thought and excursions of sympathy, the
concussion that couldn’t bring them down—the arrest produced by the so
remarkably distinct figure that, at Fawns, for the previous weeks, was
constantly crossing, in its regular revolution, the further end of any
watched perspective. Whoever knew, or whoever didn’t, whether or to what
extent Charlotte, with natural business in Eaton Square, had shuffled
other opportunities under that cloak, it was all matter for the kind of
quiet ponderation the little man who so kept his wandering way had made
his own. It was part of the very inveteracy of his straw hat and his
white waistcoat, of the trick of his hands in his pockets, of the
detachment of the attention he fixed on his slow steps from behind his
secure pince-nez. The thing that never failed now as an item in the
picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife’s immaterial
tether, so marked to Maggie’s sense during her last month in the
country. Mrs. Verver’s straight neck had certainly not slipped it;
nor had the other end of the long cord—oh, quite conveniently
long!—disengaged its smaller loop from the hooked thumb that, with
his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out of sight. To have
recognised, for all its tenuity, the play of this gathered lasso might
inevitably be to wonder with what magic it was twisted, to what tension
subjected, but could never be to doubt either of its adequacy to its
office or of its perfect durability. These reminded states for the
Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping. So many things her
father knew that she even yet didn’t!
All this, at present, with Mrs. Assingham, passed through her in quick
vibrations. She had expressed, while the revolution of her thought
was incomplete, the idea of what Amerigo “ought,” on his side, in the
premises, to be capable of, and then had felt her companion’s answering
stare. But she insisted on what she had meant. “He ought to wish to see
her—and I mean in some protected and independent way, as he used to—in
case of her being herself able to manage it. That,” said Maggie with the
courage of her conviction, “he ought to be ready, he ought to be happy,
he ought to feel himself sworn—little as it is for the end of such
a history!—to take from her. It’s as if he wished to get off without
taking anything.”
Mrs. Assingham deferentially mused. “But for what purpose is it your
idea that they should again so intimately meet?”
“For any purpose they like. That’s THEIR affair.”
Fanny Assingham sharply laughed, then irrepressibly fell back to her
constant position. “You’re splendid—perfectly splendid.” To which, as
the Princess, shaking an impatient head, wouldn’t have it again at all,
she subjoined: “Or if you’re not it’s because you’re so sure. I mean
sure of HIM.”
“Ah, I’m exactly NOT sure of him. If I were sure of him I shouldn’t
doubt—!” But Maggie cast about her.
“Doubt what?” Fanny pressed as she waited.
“Well, that he must feel how much less than she he pays—and how that
ought to keep her present to him.”
This, in its turn, after an instant, Mrs. Assingham could meet with a
smile. “Trust him, my dear, to keep her present! But trust him also to
keep himself absent. Leave him his own way.”
“I’ll leave him everything,” said Maggie. “Only—you know it’s my
nature—I THINK.”
“It’s your nature to think too much,” Fanny Assingham a trifle coarsely
risked.
This but quickened, however, in the Princess the act she reprobated.
“That may be. But if I hadn’t thought—!”
“You wouldn’t, you mean, have been where you are?”
“Yes, because they, on their side, thought of everything BUT that. They
thought of everything but that I might think.”
“Or even,” her friend too superficially concurred, “that your father
might!”
As to this, at all events, Maggie discriminated. “No, that wouldn’t have
prevented them; for they knew that his first care would be not to make
me do so. As it is,” Maggie added, “that has had to become his last.”
Fanny Assingham took it in deeper—for what it immediately made her give
out louder. “HE’S splendid then.” She sounded it almost aggressively; it
was what she was reduced to—she had positively to place it.
“Ah, that as much as you please!”
Maggie said this and left it, but the tone of it had the next moment
determined in her friend a fresh reaction. “You think, both of you, so
abysmally and yet so quietly. But it’s what will have saved you.”
“Oh,” Maggie returned, “it’s what—from the moment they discovered we
could think at all—will have saved THEM. For they’re the ones who are
saved,” she went on. “We’re the ones who are lost.”
“Lost—?”
“Lost to each other—father and I.” And then as her friend appeared to
demur, “Oh yes,” Maggie quite lucidly declared, “lost to each other much
more, really, than Amerigo and Charlotte are; since for them it’s just,
it’s right, it’s deserved, while for us it’s only sad and strange and
not caused by our fault. But I don’t know,” she went on, “why I talk
about myself, for it’s on father it really comes. I let him go,” said
Maggie.
“You let him, but you don’t make him.”
“I take it from him,” she answered.
“But what else can you do?”
“I take it from him,” the Princess repeated. “I do what I knew from the
first I SHOULD do. I get off by giving him up.”
“But if he gives you?” Mrs. Assingham presumed to object. “Doesn’t it
moreover then,” she asked, “complete the very purpose with which he
married—that of making you and leaving you more free?”
Maggie looked at her long. “Yes—I help him to do that.”
Mrs. Assingham hesitated, but at last her bravery flared. “Why not call
it then frankly his complete success?”
“Well,” said Maggie, “that’s all that’s left me to do.”
“It’s a success,” her friend ingeniously developed, “with which you’ve
simply not interfered.” And as if to show that she spoke without levity
Mrs. Assingham went further. “He has made it a success for THEM—!”
“Ah, there you are!” Maggie responsively mused. “Yes,” she said the next
moment, “that’s why Amerigo stays.”
“Let alone it’s why Charlotte goes.” that Mrs. Assingham, and
emboldened, smiled “So he knows—?”
But Maggie hung back. “Amerigo—?” After which, however, she blushed—to
her companion’s recognition.
“Your father. He knows what YOU know? I mean,” Fanny faltered—“well,
how much does he know?” Maggie’s silence and Maggie’s eyes had in fact
arrested the push of the question—which, for a decent consistency, she
couldn’t yet quite abandon. “What I should rather say is does he know
how much?” She found it still awkward. “How much, I mean, they did. How
far”—she touched it up—“they went.”
Maggie had waited, but only with a question. “Do you think he does?”
“Know at least something? Oh, about him I can’t think. He’s beyond me,”
said Fanny Assingham.
“Then do you yourself know?”
“How much—?”
“How much.”
“How far—?”
“How far.”
Fanny had appeared to wish to make sure, but there was something she
remembered—remembered in time and even with a smile. “I’ve told you
before that I know absolutely nothing.”
“Well—that’s what _I_ know,” said the Princess.
Her friend again hesitated. “Then nobody knows—? I mean,” Mrs.
Assingham explained, “how much your father does.”
Oh, Maggie showed that she understood. “Nobody.”
“Not—a little—Charlotte?”
“A little?” the Princess echoed. “To know anything would be, for her, to
know enough.”
“And she doesn’t know anything?”
“If she did,” Maggie answered, “Amerigo would.”
“And that’s just it—that he doesn’t?”
“That’s just it,” said the Princess profoundly.
On which Mrs. Assingham reflected. “Then how is Charlotte so held?”
“Just by that.”
“By her ignorance?”
“By her ignorance.” Fanny wondered. “A torment—?”
“A torment,” said Maggie with tears in her eyes.
Her companion a moment watched them. “But the Prince then—?”
“How is HE held?” Maggie asked.
“How is HE held?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you that!” And the Princess again broke off.