"I don't quite see, my dear," Colonel Assingham said to his wife
the night of Charlotte's arrival, "I don't quite see, I'm bound
to say, why you take it, even at the worst, so ferociously hard.
It isn't your fault, after all, is it? I'll be hanged, at any
rate, if it's mine."
The hour was late, and the young lady who had disembarked at
Southampton that morning to come up by the "steamer special," and
who had then settled herself at an hotel only to re-settle
herself a couple of hours later at a private house, was by this
time, they might hope, peacefully resting from her exploits.
There had been two men at dinner, rather battered
brothers-in-arms, of his own period, casually picked up by her
host the day before, and when the gentlemen, after the meal,
rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room, Charlotte, pleading
fatigue, had already excused herself. The beguiled warriors,
however, had stayed till after eleven--Mrs. Assingham, though
finally quite without illusions, as she said, about the military
character, was always beguiling to old soldiers; and as the
Colonel had come in, before dinner, only in time to dress, he had
not till this moment really been summoned to meet his companion
over the situation that, as he was now to learn, their visitor's
advent had created for them. It was actually more than midnight,
the servants had been sent to bed, the rattle of the wheels had
ceased to come in through a window still open to the August air,
and Robert Assingham had been steadily learning, all the while,
what it thus behoved him to know. But the words just quoted from
him presented themselves, for the moment, as the essence of his
spirit and his attitude. He disengaged, he would be damned if he
didn't--they were both phrases he repeatedly used--his
responsibility. The simplest, the sanest, the most obliging of
men, he habitually indulged in extravagant language. His wife had
once told him, in relation to his violence of speech; that such
excesses, on his part, made her think of a retired General whom
she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, fighting and winning
battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little
fortresses of wood and little armies of tin. Her husband's
exaggerated emphasis was his box of toy soldiers, his military
game. It harmlessly gratified in him, for his declining years,
the military instinct; bad words, when sufficiently numerous and
arrayed in their might, could represent battalions, squadrons,
tremendous cannonades and glorious charges of cavalry. It was
natural, it was delightful--the romance, and for her as well, of
camp life and of the perpetual booming of guns. It was fighting
to the end, to the death, but no one was ever killed.
Less fortunate than she, nevertheless, in spite of his wealth of
expression, he had not yet found the image that described her
favourite game; all he could do was practically to leave it to
her, emulating her own philosophy. He had again and again sat up
late to discuss those situations in which her finer consciousness
abounded, but he had never failed to deny that anything in life,
anything of hers, could be a situation for himself. She might be
in fifty at once if she liked--and it was what women did like, at
their ease, after all; there always being, when they had too much
of any, some man, as they were well aware, to get them out. He
wouldn't at any price, have one, of any sort whatever, of his
own, or even be in one along with her. He watched her,
accordingly, in her favourite element, very much as he had
sometimes watched, at the Aquarium, the celebrated lady who, in a
slight, though tight, bathing-suit, turned somersaults and did
tricks in the tank of water which looked so cold and
uncomfortable to the non-amphibious. He listened to his companion
to-night, while he smoked his last pipe, he watched her through
her demonstration, quite as if he had paid a shilling. But it was
true that, this being the case, he desired the value of his
money. What was it, in the name of wonder, that she was so bent
on being responsible FOR? What did she pretend was going to
happen, and what, at the worst, could the poor girl do, even
granting she wanted to do anything? What, at the worst, for that
matter, could she be conceived to have in her head?
"If she had told me the moment she got here," Mrs. Assingham
replied, "I shouldn't have my difficulty in finding out. But she
wasn't so obliging, and I see no sign at all of her becoming so.
What's certain is that she didn't come for nothing. She wants"--
she worked it out at her leisure--"to see the Prince again. THAT
isn't what troubles me. I mean that such a fact, as a fact,
isn't. But what I ask myself is, What does she want it FOR?"
"What's the good of asking yourself if you know you don't know?"
The Colonel sat back at his own ease, with an ankle resting on
the other knee and his eyes attentive to the good appearance of
an extremely slender foot which he kept jerking in its neat
integument of fine-spun black silk and patent leather. It seemed
to confess, this member, to consciousness of military discipline,
everything about it being as polished and perfect, as straight
and tight and trim, as a soldier on parade. It went so far as to
imply that someone or other would have "got" something or other,
confinement to barracks or suppression of pay, if it hadn't been
just as it was. Bob Assingham was distinguished altogether by a
leanness of person, a leanness quite distinct from physical
laxity, which might have been determined, on the part of superior
powers, by views of transport and accommodation, and which in
fact verged on the abnormal. He "did" himself as well as his
friends mostly knew, yet remained hungrily thin, with facial,
with abdominal cavities quite grim in their effect, and with a
consequent looseness of apparel that, combined with a choice of
queer light shades and of strange straw-like textures, of the
aspect of Chinese mats, provocative of wonder at his sources of
supply, suggested the habit of tropic islands, a continual
cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on wide verandahs.
His smooth round head, with the particular shade of its white
hair, was like a silver pot reversed; his cheekbones and the
bristle of his moustache were worthy of Attila the Hun. The
hollows of his eyes were deep and darksome, but the eyes within
them, were like little blue flowers plucked that morning. He knew
everything that could be known about life, which he regarded as,
for far the greater part, a matter of pecuniary arrangement. His
wife accused him of a want, alike, of moral and of intellectual
reaction, or rather indeed of a complete incapacity for either.
He never went even so far as to understand what she meant, and it
didn't at all matter, since he could be in spite of the
limitation a perfectly social creature. The infirmities, the
predicaments of men neither surprised nor shocked him, and
indeed--which was perhaps his only real loss in a thrifty career
--scarce even amused; he took them for granted without horror,
classifying them after their kind and calculating results and
chances. He might, in old bewildering climates, in old campaigns
of cruelty and license, have had such revelations and known such
amazements that he had nothing more to learn. But he was wholly
content, in spite of his fondness, in domestic discussion, for
the superlative degree; and his kindness, in the oddest way,
seemed to have nothing to do with his experience. He could deal
with things perfectly, for all his needs, without getting near
them.
This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of
whose meanings he knew he could neglect. He edited, for their
general economy, the play of her mind, just as he edited,
savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams.
The thing in the world that was least of a mystery to him was his
Club, which he was accepted as perhaps too completely managing,
and which he managed on lines of perfect penetration. His
connection with it was really a master-piece of editing. This was
in fact, to come back, very much the process he might have been
proposing to apply to Mrs. Assingham's view of what was now
before them; that is to their connection with Charlotte Stant's
possibilities. They wouldn't lavish on them all their little
fortune of curiosity and alarm; certainly they wouldn't spend
their cherished savings so early in the day. He liked Charlotte,
moreover, who was a smooth and compact inmate, and whom he felt
as, with her instincts that made against waste, much more of his
own sort than his wife. He could talk with her about Fanny almost
better than he could talk with Fanny about Charlotte. However, he
made at present the best of the latter necessity, even to the
pressing of the question he has been noted as having last
uttered. "If you can't think what to be afraid of, wait till you
can think. Then you'll do it much better. Or otherwise, if that's
waiting too long, find out from HER. Don't try to find out from
ME. Ask her herself."
Mrs. Assingham denied, as we know, that her husband had a play of
mind; so that she could, on her side, treat these remarks only as
if they had been senseless physical gestures or nervous facial
movements. She overlooked them as from habit and kindness; yet
there was no one to whom she talked so persistently of such
intimate things. "It's her friendship with Maggie that's the
immense complication. Because THAT," she audibly mused, "is so
natural."
"Then why can't she have come out for it?"
"She came out," Mrs. Assingham continued to meditate, "because
she hates America. There was no place for her there--she didn't
fit in. She wasn't in sympathy--no more were the people she saw.
Then it's hideously dear; she can't, on her means, begin to live
there. Not at all as she can, in a way, here."
"In the way, you mean, of living with US?"
"Of living with anyone. She can't live by visits alone--and she
doesn't want to. She's too good for it even if she could. But
she will--she MUST, sooner or later--stay with THEM. Maggie will
want her--Maggie will make her. Besides, she'll want to herself."
"Then why won't that do," the Colonel asked, "for you to think
it's what she has come for?"
"How will it do, HOW?"--she went on as without hearing him.
"That's what one keeps feeling."
"Why shouldn't it do beautifully?"
"That anything of the past," she brooded, "should come back NOW?
How will it do, how will it do?"
"It will do, I daresay, without your wringing your hands over it.
When, my dear," the Colonel pursued as he smoked, "have you ever
seen anything of yours--anything that you've done--NOT do?"
"Ah, I didn't do this!" It brought her answer straight. "I didn't
bring her back."
"Did you expect her to stay over there all her days to oblige
you?"
"Not a bit--for I shouldn't have minded her coming after their
marriage. It's her coming, this way, before." To which she added
with inconsequence: "I'm too sorry for her--of course she can't
enjoy it. But I don't see what perversity rides her. She needn't
have looked it all so in the face--as she doesn't do it, I
suppose, simply for discipline. It's almost--that's the bore of
it--discipline to ME."
"Perhaps then," said Bob Assingham, "that's what has been her
idea. Take it, for God's sake, as discipline to you and have done
with it. It will do," he added, "for discipline to me as well."
She was far, however, from having done with it; it was a
situation with such different sides, as she said, and to none of
which one could, in justice, be blind. "It isn't in the least,
you know, for instance, that I believe she's bad. Never, never,"
Mrs. Assingham declared. "I don't think that of her."
"Then why isn't that enough?"
Nothing was enough, Mrs. Assingham signified, but that she should
develop her thought. "She doesn't deliberately intend, she
doesn't consciously wish, the least complication. It's perfectly
true that she thinks Maggie a dear--as who doesn't? She's
incapable of any PLAN to hurt a hair of her head. Yet here she
is--and there THEY are," she wound up.
Her husband again, for a little, smoked in silence. "What in the
world, between them, ever took place?"
"Between Charlotte and the Prince? Why, nothing--except their
having to recognise that nothing COULD. That was their little
romance--it was even their little tragedy."
"But what the deuce did they DO?"
"Do? They fell in love with each other--but, seeing it wasn't
possible, gave each other up."
"Then where was the romance?"
"Why, in their frustration, in their having the courage to look
the facts in the face."
"What facts?" the Colonel went on.
"Well, to begin with, that of their neither of them having the
means to marry. If she had had even a little--a little, I mean,
for two--I believe he would bravely have done it." After which,
as her husband but emitted an odd vague sound, she corrected
herself. "I mean if he himself had had only a little--or a little
more than a little, a little for a prince. They would have done
what they could"--she did them justice"--if there had been a way.
But there wasn't a way, and Charlotte, quite to her honour, I
consider, understood it. He HAD to have money--it was a question
of life and death. It wouldn't have been a bit amusing, either,
to marry him as a pauper--I mean leaving him one. That was what
she had--as HE had--the reason to see."
"And their reason is what you call their romance?"