"Through everything. She KNOWS the Prince."
"And Maggie doesn't. No, dear thing"--Mrs. Assingham had to
recognise it--"she doesn't."
"So that Charlotte has come out to give her lessons?"
She continued, Fanny Assingham, to work out her thought. "She has
done this great thing for him. That is, a year ago, she
practically did it. She practically, at any rate, helped him to
do it himself--and helped me to help him. She kept off, she
stayed away, she left him free; and what, moreover, were her
silences to Maggie but a direct aid to him? If she had spoken in
Florence; if she had told her own poor story; if she had, come
back at any time--till within a few weeks ago; if she hadn't gone
to New York and hadn't held out there: if she hadn't done these
things all that has happened since would certainly have been
different. Therefore she's in a position to be consistent now.
She knows the Prince," Mrs. Assingham repeated. It involved even
again her former recognition. "And Maggie, dear thing, doesn't."
She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was
but the deeper drop therefore to her husband's flat common sense.
"In other words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? Then if
she's in danger, there IS danger."
"There WON'T be--with Charlotte's understanding of it. That's
where she has had her conception of being able to be heroic, of
being able in fact to be sublime. She is, she will be"--the good
lady by this time glowed. "So she sees it--to become, for her
best friend, an element of POSITIVE safety."
Bob Assingham looked at it hard. "Which of them do you call her
best friend?"
She gave a toss of impatience. "I'll leave you to discover!" But
the grand truth thus made out she had now completely adopted.
"It's for US, therefore, to be hers."
"'Hers'?"
"You and I. It's for us to be Charlotte's. It's for us, on our
side, to see HER through."
"Through her sublimity?"
"Through her noble, lonely life. Only--that's essential--it
mustn't be lonely. It will be all right if she marries."
"So we're to marry her?"
"We're to marry her. It will be," Mrs. Assingham continued, "the
great thing I can do." She made it out more and more. "It will
make up."
"Make up for what?" As she said nothing, however, his desire for
lucidity renewed itself. "If everything's so all right what is
there to make up for?"
"Why, if I did do either of them, by any chance, a wrong. If I
made a mistake."
"You'll make up for it by making another?" And then as she again
took her time: "I thought your whole point is just that you're
sure."
"One can never be ideally sure of anything. There are always
possibilities."
"Then, if we can but strike so wild, why keep meddling?"
It made her again look at him. "Where would you have been, my
dear, if I hadn't meddled with YOU?"
"Ah, that wasn't meddling--I was your own. I was your own," said
the Colonel, "from the moment I didn't object."
"Well, these people won't object. They are my own too--in the
sense that I'm awfully fond of them. Also in the sense," she
continued, "that I think they're not so very much less fond of
me. Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very
good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to
change it. We must live IN it and with it. Therefore to see that
Charlotte gets a good husband as soon as possible--that, as I
say, will be one of my ways of living. It will cover," she said
with conviction, "all the ground." And then as his own conviction
appeared to continue as little to match: "The ground, I mean, of
any nervousness I may ever feel. It will be in fact my duty
and I shan't rest till my duty's performed." She had arrived by
this time at something like exaltation. "I shall give, for the
next year or two if necessary, my life to it. I shall have done
in that case what I can."
He took it at last as it came. "You hold there's no limit to what
you 'can'?"
"I don't say there's no limit, or anything of the sort. I say
there are good chances--enough of them for hope. Why shouldn't
there be when a girl is, after all, all that she is?"
"By after 'all' you mean after she's in love with somebody else?"
The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed
to be fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up. "She's not too much
in love not herself to want to marry. She would now particularly
like to."
"Has she told you so?"
"Not yet. It's too soon. But she will. Meanwhile, however, I
don't require the information. Her marrying will prove the
truth."
"And what truth?"
"The truth of everything I say."
"Prove it to whom?"
"Well, to myself, to begin with. That will be enough for me--to
work for her. What it will prove," Mrs. Assingham presently went
on, "will be that she's cured. That she accepts the situation."
He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. "The
situation of doing the one thing she can that will really seem to
cover her tracks?"
His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he
was merely vulgar. "The one thing she can do that will really
make new tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other,
will be wise and right. The thing that will best give her her
chance to be magnificent."
He slowly emitted his smoke. "And best give you, by the same
token, yours to be magnificent with her?"
"I shall be as magnificent, at least, as I can."