III

It had been said as a joke, but as, after this, they awaited

their friend in silence, the effect of the silence was to turn

the time to gravity--a gravity not dissipated even when the

Prince next spoke. He had been thinking the case over and making

up his mind. A handsome, clever, odd girl staying with one was a

complication. Mrs. Assingham, so far, was right. But there were

the facts--the good relations, from schooldays, of the two young

women, and the clear confidence with which one of them had

arrived. "She can come, you know, at any time, to US."

Mrs. Assingham took it up with an irony beyond laughter. "You'd

like her for your honeymoon?"

"Oh no, you must keep her for that. But why not after?"

She had looked at him a minute; then, at the sound of a voice in

the corridor, they had got up. "Why not? You're splendid!"

Charlotte Stant, the next minute, was with them, ushered in as

she had alighted from her cab, and prepared for not finding Mrs.

Assingham alone--this would have been to be noticed--by the

butler's answer, on the stairs, to a question put to him. She

could have looked at her hostess with such straightness and

brightness only from knowing that the Prince was also there--the

discrimination of but a moment, yet which let him take her in

still better than if she had instantly faced him. He availed

himself of the chance thus given him, for he was conscious of all

these things. What he accordingly saw, for some seconds, with

intensity, was a tall, strong, charming girl who wore for him, at

first, exactly the look of her adventurous situation, a

suggestion, in all her person, in motion and gesture, in free,

vivid, yet altogether happy indications of dress, from the

becoming compactness of her hat to the shade of tan in her shoes,

of winds and waves and custom-houses, of far countries and long

journeys, the knowledge of how and where and the habit, founded

on experience, of not being afraid. He was aware, at the same

time, that of this combination the "strongminded" note was not,

as might have been apprehended, the basis; he was now

sufficiently familiar with English-speaking types, he had sounded

attentively enough such possibilities, for a quick vision of

differences. He had, besides, his own view of this young lady's

strength of mind. It was great, he had ground to believe, but it

would never interfere with the play of her extremely personal,

her always amusing taste. This last was the thing in her--for she

threw it out positively, on the spot, like a light--that she

might have reappeared, during these moments, just to cool his

worried eyes with. He saw her in her light that immediate,

exclusive address to their friend was like a lamp she was holding

aloft for his benefit and for his pleasure. It showed him

everything--above all her presence in the world, so closely, so

irretrievably contemporaneous with his own: a sharp, sharp fact,

sharper during these instants than any other at all, even than

that of his marriage, but accompanied, in a subordinate and

controlled way, with those others, facial, physiognomic, that

Mrs. Assingham had been speaking of as subject to appreciation.

So they were, these others, as he met them again, and that was

the connection they instantly established with him. If they had

to be interpreted, this made at least for intimacy. There was but

one way certainly for HIM--to interpret them in the sense of the

already known.

Making use then of clumsy terms of excess, the face was too

narrow and too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth, on the

other hand, by no means small, with substance in its lips and a

slight, the very slightest, tendency to protrusion in the solid

teeth, otherwise indeed well arrayed and flashingly white. But it

was, strangely, as a cluster of possessions of his own that these

things, in Charlotte Stant, now affected him; items in a full

list, items recognised, each of them, as if, for the long

interval, they had been "stored" wrapped up, numbered, put away

in a cabinet. While she faced Mrs. Assingham the door of the

cabinet had opened of itself; he took the relics out, one by one,

and it was more and more, each instant, as if she were giving him

time. He saw again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking,

brown, but that there was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for

"appreciation"--a colour indescribable and of which he had known

no other case, something that gave her at moments the sylvan

head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her

wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be of

the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine

sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and of which the

apparent firmness is expressed in their old silver and old

bronze. He knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and

the shape and colour of her finger-nails, he knew her special

beauty of movement and line when she turned her back, and the

perfect working of all her main attachments, that of some

wonderful finished instrument, something intently made for

exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the extraordinary

fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded flower,

which gave her a likeness also to some long, loose silk purse,

well filled with gold pieces, but having been passed, empty,

through a finger-ring that held it together. It was as if, before

she turned to him, he had weighed the whole thing in his open

palm and even heard a little the chink of the metal. When she

did turn to him it was to recognise with her eyes what he might

have been doing. She made no circumstance of thus coming upon

him, save so far as the intelligence in her face could at any

moment make a circumstance of almost anything. If when she moved

off she looked like a huntress, she looked when she came nearer

like his notion, perhaps not wholly correct, of a muse. But what

she said was simply: "You see you're not rid of me. How is dear

Maggie?"

It was to come soon enough by the quite unforced operation of

chance, the young man's opportunity to ask her the question

suggested by Mrs. Assingham shortly before her entrance. The

license, had he chosen to embrace it, was within a few minutes

all there--the license given him literally to inquire of this

young lady how long she was likely to be with them. For a matter

of the mere domestic order had quickly determined, on Mrs.

Assingham's part, a withdrawal, of a few moments, which had the

effect of leaving her visitors free. "Mrs. Betterman's there?"

she had said to Charlotte in allusion to some member of the

household who was to have received her and seen her belongings

settled; to which Charlotte had replied that she had encountered

only the butler, who had been quite charming. She had deprecated

any action taken on behalf of her effects; but her hostess,

rebounding from accumulated cushions, evidently saw more in Mrs.

Betterman's non-appearance than could meet the casual eye. What

she saw, in short, demanded her intervention, in spite of an

earnest "Let ME go!" from the girl, and a prolonged smiling wail

over the trouble she was giving. The Prince was quite aware, at

this moment, that departure, for himself, was indicated; the

question of Miss Stant's installation didn't demand his presence;

it was a case for one to go away--if one hadn't a reason for

staying. He had a reason, however--of that he was equally aware;

and he had not for a good while done anything more conscious and

intentional than not, quickly, to take leave. His visible

insistence--for it came to that--even demanded of him a certain

disagreeable effort, the sort of effort he had mostly associated

with acting for an idea. His idea was there, his idea was to find

out something, something he wanted much to know, and to find it

out not tomorrow, not at some future time, not in short with

waiting and wondering, but if possible before quitting the place.

This particular curiosity, moreover, confounded itself a little

with the occasion offered him to satisfy Mrs. Assingham's own; he

wouldn't have admitted that he was staying to ask a rude

question--there was distinctly nothing rude in his having his

reasons. It would be rude, for that matter, to turn one's back,

without a word or two, on an old friend.

Well, as it came to pass, he got the word or two, for Mrs.

Assingham's preoccupation was practically simplifying. The little

crisis was of shorter duration than our account of it; duration,

naturally, would have forced him to take up his hat. He was

somehow glad, on finding himself alone with Charlotte, that he

had not been guilty of that inconsequence. Not to be flurried was

the kind of consistency he wanted, just as consistency was the

kind of dignity. And why couldn't he have dignity when he had so

much of the good conscience, as it were, on which such advantages

rested? He had done nothing he oughtn't--he had in fact done

nothing at all. Once more, as a man conscious of having known

many women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the

recurrent, the predestined phenomenon, the thing always as

certain as sunrise or the coming round of Saints' days, the doing

by the woman of the thing that gave her away. She did it, ever,

inevitably, infallibly--she couldn't possibly not do it. It was

her nature, it was her life, and the man could always expect it

without lifting a finger. This was HIS, the man's, any man's,

position and strength--that he had necessarily the advantage,

that he only had to wait, with a decent patience, to be placed,

in spite of himself, it might really be said, in the right. Just

so the punctuality of performance on the part of the other

creature was her weakness and her deep misfortune--not less, no

doubt, than her beauty. It produced for the man that

extraordinary mixture of pity and profit in which his relation

with her, when he was not a mere brute, mainly consisted; and

gave him in fact his most pertinent ground of being always nice

to her, nice about her, nice FOR her. She always dressed her act

up, of course, she muffled and disguised and arranged it, showing

in fact in these dissimulations a cleverness equal to but one

thing in the world, equal to her abjection: she would let it be

known for anything, for everything, but the truth of which it was

made. That was what, precisely, Charlotte Stant would be doing

now; that was the present motive and support, to a certainty, of

each of her looks and motions. She was the twentieth woman, she

was possessed by her doom, but her doom was also to arrange

appearances, and what now concerned him was to learn how she

proposed. He would help her, would arrange WITH her to any point

in reason; the only thing was to know what appearance could best

be produced and best be preserved. Produced and preserved on her

part of course; since on his own there had been luckily no folly

to cover up, nothing but a perfect accord between conduct and

obligation.

They stood there together, at all events, when the door had

closed behind their friend, with a conscious, strained smile and

very much as if each waited for the other to strike the note or

give the pitch. The young man held himself, in his silent

suspense--only not more afraid because he felt her own fear. She

was afraid of herself, however; whereas, to his gain of lucidity,

he was afraid only of her. Would she throw herself into his arms,

or would she be otherwise wonderful? She would see what he would

do--so their queer minute without words told him; and she would

act accordingly. But what could he do but just let her see that

he would make anything, everything, for her, as honourably easy

as possible? Even if she should throw herself into his arms he

would make that easy--easy, that is, to overlook, to ignore, not

to remember, and not, by the same token, either, to regret. This

was not what in fact happened, though it was also not at a single

touch, but by the finest gradations, that his tension subsided.

"It's too delightful to be back!" she said at last; and it was

all she definitely gave him--being moreover nothing but what

anyone else might have said. Yet with two or three other things

that, on his response, followed it, it quite pointed the path,

while the tone of it, and her whole attitude, were as far removed

as need have been from the truth of her situation. The abjection

that was present to him as of the essence quite failed to peep

out, and he soon enough saw that if she was arranging she could

be trusted to arrange. Good--it was all he asked; and all the

more that he could admire and like her for it,

The particular appearance she would, as they said, go in for was

that of having no account whatever to give him--it would be in

fact that of having none to give anybody--of reasons or of

motives, of comings or of goings. She was a charming young woman

who had met him before, but she was also a charming young woman

with a life of her own. She would take it high--up, up, up, ever

so high. Well then, he would do the same; no height would be too

great for them, not even the dizziest conceivable to a young

person so subtle. The dizziest seemed indeed attained when, after

another moment, she came as near as she was to come to an apology

for her abruptness.

"I've been thinking of Maggie, and at last I yearned for her. I

wanted to see her happy--and it doesn't strike me I find you too

shy to tell me I SHALL."

"Of course she's happy, thank God! Only it's almost terrible, you

know, the happiness of young, good, generous creatures. It rather

frightens one. But the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints," said

the Prince, "have her in their keeping."

"Certainly they have. She's the dearest of the dear. But I

needn't tell you," the girl added.

"Ah," he returned with gravity, "I feel that I've still much to

learn about her." To which he subjoined "She'll rejoice awfully

in your being with us."

"Oh, you don't need me!" Charlotte smiled. "It's her hour. It's a

great hour. One has seen often enough, with girls, what it is.

But that," she said, "is exactly why. Why I've wanted, I mean,

not to miss it."

He bent on her a kind, comprehending face. "You mustn't miss

anything." He had got it, the pitch, and he could keep it now,

for all he had needed was to have it given him. The pitch was the

happiness of his wife that was to be--the sight of that happiness

as a joy for an old friend. It was, yes, magnificent, and not the

less so for its coming to him, suddenly, as sincere, as nobly

exalted. Something in Charlotte's eyes seemed to tell him this,

seemed to plead with him in advance as to what he was to find in

it. He was eager--and he tried to show her that too--to find what

she liked; mindful as he easily could be of what the friendship

had been for Maggie. It had been armed with the wings of young

imagination, young generosity; it had been, he believed--always

counting out her intense devotion to her father--the liveliest

emotion she had known before the dawn of the sentiment inspired

by himself. She had not, to his knowledge, invited the object of

it to their wedding, had not thought of proposing to her, for a

matter of a couple of hours, an arduous and expensive journey.

But she had kept her connected and informed, from week to week,

in spite of preparations and absorptions. "Oh, I've been writing

to Charlotte--I wish you knew her better:" he could still hear,

from recent weeks, this record of the fact, just as he could

still be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous

element in Maggie's wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate

to her. Older and perhaps more intelligent, at any rate, why

shouldn't Charlotte respond--and be quite FREE to respond--to

such fidelities with something more than mere formal good

manners? The relations of women with each other were of the

strangest, it was true, and he probably wouldn't have trusted

here a young person of his own race. He was proceeding throughout

on the ground of the immense difference--difficult indeed as it

might have been to disembroil in this young person HER race-

quality. Nothing in her definitely placed her; she was a rare, a

special product. Her singleness, her solitude, her want of means,

that is her want of ramifications and other advantages,

contributed to enrich her somehow with an odd, precious

neutrality, to constitute for her, so detached yet so aware, a

sort of small social capital. It was the only one she had--it was

the only one a lonely, gregarious girl COULD have, since few,

surely, had in anything like the same degree arrived at it, and

since this one indeed had compassed it but through the play of

some gift of nature to which you could scarce give a definite

name.

It wasn't a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which

she juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled with balls or hoops

or lighted brands--it wasn't at least entirely that, for he had

known people almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had

quite failed to make interesting. He was polyglot himself, for

that matter--as was the case too with so many of his friends and

relations; for none of whom, more than for himself, was it

anything but a common convenience. The point was that in this

young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a mystery: so,

certainly, he had more than once felt in noting, on her lips,

that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect

felicity in the use of Italian. He had known strangers--a few,

and mostly men--who spoke his own language agreeably; but he had

known neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte's almost

mystifying instinct. He remembered how, from the first of their

acquaintance, she had made no display of it, quite as if English,

between them, his English so matching with hers, were their

inevitable medium. He had perceived all by accident--by hearing

her talk before him to somebody else that they had an alternative

as good; an alternative in fact as much better as the amusement

for him was greater in watching her for the slips that never

came. Her account of the mystery didn't suffice: her recall of

her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; her parents, from

the great country, but themselves already of a corrupt

generation, demoralised, falsified, polyglot well before her,

with the Tuscan balia who was her first remembrance; the servants

of the villa, the dear contadini of the poder, the little girls

and the other peasants of the next podere, all the rather shabby

but still ever so pretty human furniture of her early time,

including the good sisters of the poor convent of the Tuscan

hills, the convent shabbier than almost anything else, but

prettier too, in which she had been kept at school till the

subsequent phase, the phase of the much grander institution in

Paris at which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened, and as

a smaller girl, three years before her own ending of her period

of five. Such reminiscences, naturally, gave a ground, but they

had not prevented him from insisting that some strictly civil

ancestor--generations back, and from the Tuscan hills if she

would-made himself felt, ineffaceably, in her blood and in her

tone. She knew nothing of the ancestor, but she had taken his

theory from him, gracefully enough, as one of the little presents

that make friendship flourish. These matters, however, all melted

together now, though a sense of them was doubtless concerned, not

unnaturally, in the next thing, of the nature of a surmise, that

his discretion let him articulate. "You haven't, I rather

gather, particularly liked your country?" They would stick, for

the time, to their English.

"It doesn't, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn't in

the least matter, over there, whether one likes it or not--that

is to anyone but one's self. But I didn't like it," said

Charlotte Stant.

"That's not encouraging then to me, is it?" the Prince went on.

"Do you mean because you're going?"

"Oh yes, of course we're going. I've wanted immensely to go."

She hesitated. "But now?--immediately?"

"In a month or two--it seems to be the new idea." On which there

was something in her face--as he imagined--that made him say:

"Didn't Maggie write to you?"

"Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of

course you must stay"--Charlotte was easily clear--"as long as

possible."

"Is that what you did?" he laughed. "You stayed as long as

possible?"

"Well, it seemed to me so--but I hadn't 'interests.' You'll have

them--on a great scale. It's the country for interests," said

Charlotte. "If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn't have

left it."

He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. "Yours then

are rather here?"

"Oh, mine!"--the girl smiled. "They take up little room, wherever

they are."

It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it

somehow did for her-it determined in him a speech that would have

seemed a few minutes before precarious and in questionable taste.

The lead she had given him made the difference, and he felt it as

really a lift on finding an honest and natural word rise, by its

license, to his lips. Nothing surely could be, for both of them,

more in the note of a high bravery. "I've been thinking it all

the while so probable, you know, that you would have seen your

way to marrying."

She looked at him an instant, and, just for these seconds, he

feared for what he might have spoiled. "To marrying whom?"

"Why, some good, kind, clever, rich American."

Again his security hung in the balance--then she was, as he felt,

admirable.

"I tried everyone I came across. I did my best. I showed I had

come, quite publicly, FOR that. Perhaps I showed it too much. At

any rate it was no use. I had to recognise it. No one would have

me." Then she seemed to show as sorry for his having to hear of

her anything so disconcerting. She pitied his feeling about it;

if he was disappointed she would cheer him up. "Existence, you

know, all the same, doesn't depend on that. I mean," she smiled,

"on having caught a husband."

"Oh--existence!" the Prince vaguely commented. "You think I ought

to argue for more than mere existence?" she asked. "I don't see

why MY existence--even reduced as much as you like to being

merely mine--should be so impossible. There are things, of sorts,

I should be able to have--things I should be able to be. The

position of a single woman to-day is very favourable, you know."

"Favourable to what?"

"Why, just TO existence--which may contain, after all, in one way

and another, so much. It may contain, at the worst, even

affections; affections in fact quite particularly; fixed, that

is, on one's friends. I'm extremely fond of Maggie, for instance

--I quite adore her. How could I adore her more if I were married

to one of the people you speak of?"